Daily Report: Microsoft, Ahead in the Cloud - The New York Times

Looking at clouds from both sides now

"Here, as elsewhere, things were not exactly what they seemed, in good ways and bad. Adjusting for inflation, Microsoft shares, about $60.60 apiece in after-hours trading Thursday, will have to rise above $85.09 to be worth more than they were at the peak of the internet bubble.

In addition, it’s still hard to say exactly what to make of cloud-computing revenue at Microsoft: Is a customer really paying for access to the kind of advanced hardware and software that is in Microsoft’s cloud, called Azure?

Or is the business buying standard Microsoft software applications, like Office, which are now sold in jazzed-up versions that are sold via Azure, as a subscription? To some, that kind of revenue matters less, since people buy Office anyway — it’s not like Microsoft really did anything new to get this money, the argument runs."

Daily Report: Microsoft, Ahead in the Cloud - The New York Times