Think of all the tiresome Twitter discussions that went like "I like bagels -> oh, so you hate croissants?".

I am going to have to disagree with this. Azure is number 2, because MS is number 1 in business software. Cloud is a very natural expansion for that market. They just had to build something that isn't horrible and the customers would have come crawling to MS.

Managing to keep the MS Office grift going and even expand it with MS Teams is something

Their strategy and execution was insanely good, and I doubt we'll ever see anything so comprehensive ever again.

1. Clear mission statement: A PC in very house.

2. A nationwide training + certification program for software engineers and system admins across all of Microsoft's tooling

3. Programming lessons in schools and community centers across the country to ensure kids got started using MS tooling first

4. Their developer operations divisions was an insane powerhouse, they had an army of in house technical writers creating some of the best documentation that has ever existed. Microsoft contracted out to real software engineering companies to create fully fledged demo apps to show off new technologies, these weren't hello world sample apps, they were real applications that had months of effort and testing put into them.

5. Because the internet wasn't a distribution platform yet, Microsoft mailed out huge binders of physical CDs with sample code, documentation, and dev editions of all their software.

6. Microsoft hired the top technical writers to write books on the top MS software stacks and SDKs.

7. Their internal test labs had thousands upon thousands of manual testers whose job was to run through manual tests of all the most popular software, dating back a decade+, ensuring it kept working with each new build of Windows.

8. Microsoft pressed PC OEMs to lower prices again and again. MS also put their weight behind standards like AC'97 to further drop costs.

9. Microsoft innovated relentlessly, from online gaming to smart TVs to tablets. Microsoft was an early entrant in a ton of fields. The first Windows tablet PC was in 1991! Microsoft tried to make smart TVs a thing before there was any content, or even wide spread internet adoption (oops). They created some of the first e-readers, the first multimedia PDAs, the first smart infotainment systems, and so on and so forth.

And they did all this with a far leaner team than what they have now!

(IIRC the Windows CE kernel team was less than a dozen people!)

Methods have evolved a lot in a decade.

Note how AlphaGenome prediction at 1 bp resolution for CAGE is poor. Just Pearson r = 0.49. CAGE is very often used to pinpoint causal regulatory variants.