I had to stop at the "1. The success of Windows Azure" part. Will get back to the article as soon as I stop laughing...
Amazon's AWS, on the other hand, is estimated to have brought in between $1.5 and $2 billion (http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2013-03-07-what-if-amazon..., http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructur...) during the same period.
So while Azure is still booking less business than AWS is, it's definitely a major competitor. Maybe the major competitor. And since the market for virtualized platforms is still in early days, there's lots of room for that revenue figure to grow substantially even if Azure ends up stuck at #2 behind AWS forever.
I have worked for years as a .Net consultant, and I had no idea Azure had grown this quickly. A couple of years ago, I thought their entire set of literature was counter-intuitive, and I quit paying attention to them.
How on Earth did they grow to be in AWS's league so quickly? Surely just getting the "default Microsoft business" wasn't enough to put them at $1 billion ??
One month, web sites, another virtual machines, then Hadoop. Oh, wait, and mobile services. The list goes on; they've catched up with Amazon on offerings more or less.
Oh and let's not forget that Azure support is fucking awesome.
I see Azure as a cloud service for Windows dev, I might be wrong it, Azure may just have an image problem but it just doesn't ring a bell outside the Windows world.