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Don't look now, but Microsoft is surprising in the cloud

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Conventional wisdom says that a revolutionary company in one segment usually can't make the leap to the next, especially if the next revolution comes at the expense of the technology built by that initial company. Ergo, companies built on selling on-premises software should be abject failures at moving to the cloud, right? Well, Microsoft is getting cloud better than anyone could possibly have expected, and while everyone beats up Windows 8 and defines the company by that hairball, what's going on in other parts of the company are nothing short of remarkable.

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