I would imagine a significant portion of the cloud revenue is derivative of windows though. Whether that’s lift and shift workloads or entra id which is picked over alternatives for its compatibility with existing windows and AD infrastructure.

The only reason Azure is a success though is because of Windows. Maybe now it's so big that it can exist without Windows but Windows is the gateway into Azure. So many other companies would kill for a platform (aka Meta) and here Microsoft has one and is treating it poorly. In pure financial terms it makes sense but, as a business strategy, I think it's severely lacking.

I don't think it's sentimentality, exactly. Who picks Azure or OneDrive or AD or Office 365 or Sharepoint or Teams or any Microsoft product or service if they're not already running Windows? The desktop operating system, "legacy" though it may be, has near universal reach and has therefore been key in pushing people to their more lucrative services. But they pushed too hard, it's too obviously shit, and now people and enterprises are looking for an exit. What then?