Microsoft is a titan of the software sales industry, with an army of people all working to get Windows and Office into businesses. But, with the advent of cloud services, people are looking twice at those pricey Microsoft licenses and wondering if Google or Amazon couldn't do a better job.

As Bloomberg pointed out before the announcement, both Google and Amazon offer online services for commerce, and boast about their prowess in AI. In addition, neither company has an enormous legacy software-sales business that they have to maintain at great expense, reducing costs for consumers.

If you put together Azure and Office365, then the company's web-based offerings are a similar size to Amazon Web Services. But, as The Economist notes, Azure continues to be a money loser, which is a problem for a company that wants to make billions from the cloud by 2020.

Jessica Conditt contributed to this report.