I really like Windows, Azure and O365 and believe they have no real competition, especially when paired together. I can install Ubuntu or other Linux distros on my Windows PC, connect to my Azure VM or container easily and O365 is just simply unmatched, as hard as others try. So I advocate Azure and O365 especially and am harshly critical of Apple/Google. Microsoft generally handles the cloud aspect very well but seems still a bit lost on the OS side. Which is a bit insane to me, especially when sales skyrocketed during COVID, and Windows 11 is generally pretty solid at this point.
I have to use Azure at work, and in my experience it's a worse version of AWS/GCP:
- standard MS random indecipherable errors in the GUI (error 0x68482233: consult system administrator)
- extremely slow UI performance in the GUI
- extremely slow VM performance running their OS (even though it has 4 VCPUs, 32gb of RAM and a giant SSD)
it's a standard MS product, one where they (badly) copy the features of their competitors, and it only sells because they bundle it with their other crappy products which your company is already locked into
I never said Azure has no competition? I said when paired with their other products they have no competitor. As far as your VM, it is probably not configured properly. The GCP dashboard to me is incredibly confusing, but most power users use CLI anyhow. I've used AWS, GCP, DigitalOcean and Azure. I prefer Azure myself, though I understand different providers do better at different needs. The only Azure product I've had problems with are their Webapps, which compared to things like Beanstalk and Elastic Compute are just terrible.
What I can’t help notice about o365 is that the web versions are less buggy and more stable and are catching up in feature completeness. Desktop outlook needs to be purged with fire. This makes me wonder for how long it will be necessary to use Windows to get the full o365 experience.
