Comment by zjaffee

This is in many ways a smart way to understand the problem, but it doesn't mean that microsoft contracts mean you're stuck with bad software. There are several verticals where Microsoft and Azure actually were smart and chose a better software product to sell on their platform than what they had in house.

One example is when they stopped trying to develop a inferior product to EMR and Dataproc, and essentially just outsourced the whole effort to a deal made between them and Databricks. Because of this I assume many enterprise azure customers have better running data solutions in that space than they wouldve had they gone with just AWS or GCP.

On the other hand, having worked for Microsoft on an Azure team, there are plenty of areas that critically need a rewrite (for dozens of different reasons), and such a solution is never found (or they just release some different product and tell those with different needs to migrate to that), where they keep on building what can only really be described as hot-fixes to meet urgent customer demands that make it harder to eventually do said critical rewrite.