Introduction to Azure

At the beginning of the 2000s, Microsoft’s data center infrastructure was smaller than their current cloud platform competitors, Amazon and Google. But Microsoft’s pockets were comparatively deep. When it launched Xbox Live in 2002 (now known as the Xbox network), it had built immense backend infrastructure to support what was then the highest-capacity online gaming service ever. From that point on, Microsoft steadily expanded its own data center capacity as it got into the network services business (MSN doesn’t count) concurrently with its expansion into the video game console business.

From what I can tell, building Xbox Live/the Xbox network for the consumer market gave Microsoft the experience it needed to start providing network services for the enterprise market. Amazon launched AWS as “Amazon.com Web Services” in 2002, its initiative to provide cloud services to the enterprise. Microsoft probably thought, “I...