critical compoent in Cloud comparisons
One critical aspect of this Microsoft versus Amazon Cloud pricing war is that no mater the paper specifications of Microsoft's Azure Cloud as compared the Amazon's EC2 offering, the underlying technology of Windows Server from Microsoft does not and cannot compare or compete favourably in any way with Amazon's Linux platform in Reliability, Robustness/Performance, Scalability and most importantly Security.
Two noted recent developments underscore this statement:
One, Netflix chose FreeBSD Software and networking services, over any Microsoft offerings, for thousands of 'Appliance' Servers for streaming millions of movies to subscribers every week. Microsoft performed poorly in evaluations.
Verisign, one of the largest Domain Certificate Authorities on the Internet, scaled up it's FreeBSD operations that added to it's Linux infrastructure. Microsoft is less than bit player there.
There are dozens, even hundreds or thousands more stories of small to very large scale technology projects - like two mentioned here, and that include IBM, Oracle, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, NASA, eBAY, all the Financial Stock Exchanges and others that rely on *NIX (Unix and/ or Linux) for their primary OS software infrastructure. Even Dell (maybe not now with MS on board) and HP are offering their own "OpenStack" based cloud Services.
There is little or no coherent or 'truthful' discussion on Microsoft centric forums and blogs even admitting such challenges or considerations