AWS doesn't have cheap Windows licenses, MSSQL, Office, and Active Directory. They're still beating Azure. Because they were first, of course -- but the point is that true competition is all about playing to your advantages and mitigating your disadvantages. Google had enormous advantages and squandered them. Maybe Microsoft's advantages were genuinely stronger, but from where I'm standing it looks like Google didn't even try.
I've seen the AWS vs Azure vs GCP drama play out a few times, once on a team with significant Microsoft legacy and twice without. In my judgement, the MS legacy, even at its most potent, was a smaller consideration than Google's unmitigated weakness, every manager's worst nightmare: the concrete risk that Google would cancel something and the manager would get blamed for not seeing it coming. Maybe I've just been blessed to work at non-dysfunctional companies where non-technical management asks the opinion of technical management on technical matters, but technical management is highly cognizant of this risk and has been for a decade.
My recommendation would have been to go on offense. Make AWS's constant over-promising and under-delivering a meme. Make Microsoft's we-have-altered-the-deal-pray-we-dont-alter-it-further enterprise pricing a meme (compare to: google and gmail are still free). Build counterveiling fears in that technical manager's mind, no lying required, because Amazon and MS earned those criticisms and they earned them hard.
Now it's probably too late. Too bad. So it goes.
