Laugh if you want to, but the point is pretty serious. Azure supposedly racked up more than $1 billion in revenue in 2012 (http://www.zdnet.com/windows-azure-joins-microsofts-billion-...).

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.