Microsoft and Red Hat partner

That's nice to know and I'm sure everyone always means well, but it doesn't change anything in factual terms. I don't know Red Hat but I'm sure they'd like to support as many cloud services as possible.

> It obviously didn't just support SuSE, so your implied either/or is just yet more of your spin.

Dude, honestly, I'm only reading what you linked, with InfoWorld saying MS had a preferential agreement with SuSE. I didn't link that, you did; if it doesn't agree with your view, why did you link it?

Your first list had SuSE (twice), CentOS and Ubuntu, and again I took it at face value, so I don't think I implied anything.

I have no horse in this, no investment, nothing; I just don't like unsupported bias. Can you say the same?

> It might have seen Azure as a rival to Red Hat cloud services

Sure, exactly like Microsoft might have seen Red Hat as a rival to Windows Server in the cloud.

> but that's just my speculation.

Yes, it is "just your speculation". That's what I said, and why I responded to your initial comment. Maybe because of insider knowledge you might have, you're interpreting facts in a somewhat biased view. That's fine, but you cannot assume everyone shares this particular view of the facts and spin it as an absolute truth.

IMHO we've said everything that needed to be said so we might as well close it here.

Speed test though... hm... 22Mbit/s is not exactly unrestricted, plus not sure how long is the burst that "speedtest-cli" makes. In my experience A0's uplink is burstable (but unusably slow when recovering from a burst), with long-term average being bang-on 5Mbps.

I do of course see exactly one "my" private IP in traceroute, but I'm not talking about that. I meant there are microsoft's private IPs (#12-#15) and dropped packets (#16 and on).

And of course, "platform doesn't forward ICMPs" is an annoyance in itself - i can't even ping my own VM.

    # target IP anonymized, but still have enough granularity to reproduce the traceroute
    traceroute to xxxxx.cloudapp.net (191.235.128.128), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
     1  192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1)  0.093 ms  0.117 ms  0.063 ms
     2  193.47.232.12 (193.47.232.12)  0.785 ms  0.785 ms  0.776 ms
     3  microsoft.mix-it.net (217.29.66.112)  1.219 ms  1.233 ms  1.225 ms
     4  xe-0-1-1-0.fra-96cbe-1a.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.42.12)  8.700 ms  8.902 ms  8.430 ms
     5  * * *
     6  * * *
     7  104.44.9.142 (104.44.9.142)  42.112 ms  39.194 ms  38.987 ms
     8  * * *
     9  be-6-0.ibr01.dub30.network.microsoft.com (104.44.4.142)  39.738 ms  38.266 ms  38.929 ms
    10  * * *
    11  ae2-0.db3-96c-3b.ntwk.msn.net (204.152.141.81)  36.986 ms  36.984 ms  36.925 ms
    12  25.149.64.247 (25.149.64.247)  36.951 ms  36.775 ms  37.152 ms
    13  10.10.132.81 (10.10.132.81)  36.917 ms  37.477 ms  37.287 ms
    14  10.60.31.77 (10.60.31.77)  37.317 ms  37.699 ms  37.899 ms
    15  10.60.31.69 (10.60.31.69)  37.653 ms  37.326 ms  37.441 ms
    16  * * *
    17  * * *
    18  * * *
    19  * * *
    20  * * *
    21  * * *
    22  * * *
    23  * * *
    24  * * *
    25  * * *
    26  * * *
    27  * * *
    28  * * *
    29  * * *
    30  * * *

Microsoft made a pact with Sun back in the day where they would support Java. If memory serves, Microsoft supported a Java that only worked on Win32 using J/Direct calls that natively supported Win32 instead of being OS independent like most Java apps.

Radio Shack sold Tandy HD machines running Xenix to business customers. In fact, Radio Shack stores themselves used a POS system running Xenix, up until the mid 1990s at least.

Microsoft sold Xenix to SCO in 1987.