Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, they are developer friendly. .NET is a good platform. It's extensive and well documented. There is innovation in C# as well. But the purpose of all that goodness is to make you sell their licenses. Where Oracle has their salesforce, Microsoft has their developers to do the selling for them. Unfortunately their licensing is from an era that has come and gone. Building software that uses things like Windows Serve…
You can build on their stuff but you won't scale and you won't grow, not because their technology doesn't scale, but because their licensing doesn't scale. What about their licensing for Azure? Does that scale or is it more of the same?
However, look at SQL Azure. Microsoft thinks that their SQL offering is worth paying 66 times what you pay for google's database (or Azure BLOBs&Tables) and that's just for storage alone ($1 per GB, maxing out at 10GB right now). Add data transfer and you may get to 100 times.
Yes SQL Server has vastly more features than google's db, but does it make me 100 times more productive or profitable? I don't think so. If I need more SQL features I could run Postgres on Amazon or use Amazon's MySQL service for roughly 10% of what SQL Azure costs.
So if SQL Azure is the model of what's to come then I think it's indeed more of the same.