Microsoft's cloud grew 73% last year. Leaders and employees from 10 tech companies weigh in on whether it can topple Amazon's cloud reign

They represent different approaches to the market. They have plenty of strength, and there's plenty of room for both [Microsoft and Amazon].

I think there are other players that need to be watched, like Google and Alibaba. There's plenty of room for more emergents.

Amazon has a good history and story in serving the web startups, and it moved quickly to commercial customers. Microsoft has a mature and evolved partner model. Microsoft does a good job in enabling partner growth.

I'm a little biased because I work with [Microsoft] Azure much more and mostly work with Microsoft technologies. They have lots of really awesome tools. I work with speech services, and there are more options on Azure.

People used to think about Microsoft in a certain way, so that reputation is still there. That's why younger developers stil don't know about the new Microsoft...They didn't see Microsoft as a technology partner [for open source]. It will take some time to change people's mindsets.

[Microsoft] embraced the fact that most customers will have their foot in more than one cloud. I don't know if there's a winner or lose, but there's enough market share to go around. We're fundamentally looking to a world where customers use multiple cloud vendors.

These cloud wars are crazy. I think it's great that Azure has the approach of bringing the best of breed into the pipeline. I'm curious on what they [Microsoft] will do with GitHub. It definitely provides an edge.

Microsoft Azure took products people already use and cloudified them. [Amazon] AWS gave people the Legos, the building blocks, they need. AWS went from building blocks up the stack, while Microsoft went from the top down.

A winner-takes-all world in a public cloud world would be a massive failure for society. That's why going multi-cloud is so important. Otherwise the public clouds become the IBM mainframes of 1985, and we know how that story ended.

It's completely different markets and customers. [Amazon] AWS is an easy way for customers to get started on cloud. If you're an industrial company and have proprietary secrets, the first thing is to make your data secure. This is where Microsoft will be the right partner.

Microsoft is a familiar choice. Microsoft already has sales relationships going back decades.

It's funny because we go to different conferences, and we work with customers across different clouds. [Amazon] AWS is very consistent. The story is continuity. I don't see that changing.

Microsoft will continue to excel in enterprise. I would guess the growth rate is much faster in terms of percentage growth.

Overall, AWS usage is huge, and I don't see that changing.

They both have different approaches to onboarding developers to the ecosystem. Microsoft has enterprise ties. That's been their strong suit from its inception.

You'll probably see pendulum swinging type of behavior. Some people might use AWS, and then find something they don't like and move to Azure, and then they'll find out the grass is greener and move back, or vice versa.

Competition is good. It's technically not a duopoly now. The mindshare is still with [Amazon] AWS. It's Microsoft's job to win more of the work.

One thing which is great for Microsoft is that their hybrid story is so much stronger, which is not the case with AWS. Will they beat AWS? No. Will they close the gap? I'm confident.

If I just look at the growth rates, they're [Microsoft] on the path to catch up. I don't know about beat but they're closing the gap.

It's never going to be a winner-take-all because people choose multi-cloud strategy for a reason — they don't want vendor lock-in. Also, the market is bound for more growth. I don't see that coming down anytime in the future.

I think if more organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy, [Microsoft] Azure stands to capture some of the market share. Where there's more significant room to grow is through innovations like the Microsoft Machine Learning and AI announcements we heard at Build.

At the end of the day, the winner is the developer, as strong competition is one of the drivers for the advancements in cloud computing.