I hate Azure, but Microsoft is at least trying to sell it properly. You get a human you can talk to and their support is responsive (although it's also useless).
> Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.
As a Youtube user, I don't really see any improvements in it (aside from technical ones) compared to 10 years ago.
This is an outdated or straight-up incorrect take. In the past quarter, Google Cloud's revenue was ~$30B, just shy of Azure (~$33B) and well shy of AWS (~$45B). That's about 28% of the cloud computing market excluding other players. Additionally, Google Cloud has grown a lot over the past few years and has been steadily eating away at AWS and Azure's market share; by next year it seems likely that it'll be bigger than Azure.
> As a Youtube user, I don't really see any improvements in it (aside from technical ones) compared to 10 years ago.
Sure, it's a website that serves videos (and ads); just because the fundamental proposition hasn't changed doesn't mean that Google hasn't done a hell of a lot of work into turning YouTube in a business that earns tens of billions of dollars a year.