> (hint: it's not)
Speaking as an SRE who less than 1yr ago was tasked with evaluating public clouds as burstable capacity for our traditionally bare metal server infrastructure; this comment is flippant at best and harmful at worst.
Azure is absolutely not comparable to the others, their performance characteristics are nowhere near consistent between equivalent specification instances, their API's are equally inconsistent _and_ they have a terrible usability model on most of their services (not all, admittedly).
In fact when it comes to technical competence, I would (and did) rank Google #1. The drawbacks of Google are:
* It's google and they have a habit of sun-setting products.
* They don't have as many features as AWS.
* They don't have developer mindshare like AWS, meaning FOSS tools will almost always work flawlessly with AWS but rarely have support for GCP (or, if they do it is a little b0rk)
* Google tends not to give human support. (but this is alleviated if you're buying support contracts)
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FWIW we chose google on technical merits alone, although my company is working with all three cloud providers in some fashion. Azure is the one we constantly mock internally for their absolutely maddening warts. Almost as bad as our own internal "cloud". (providing cloud services is not my companies core competence to be fair)
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Digression;
I would assume that a big chunk of Microsofts cloud money is coming from office365. I know my company recently started paying them in the order of 10's of millions of dollars, I assume others would too as this is "the future" of microsoft exchange/sharepoint etc;