1. Executive Support - can you assure me that MSFT will have my back when (not if) the shit hits the fan? Can I count on Satya or Jason Zander calling my CEO to reassure them if we’re working through a catastrophic issue? Because as an executive my career at this company is over otherwise when that happens.
2. Industry and analyst landscape - Which of my competitors / peers use your technology? I won’t be first in the pool. What does Gartner tell me about your company behind closed doors?
3. Competitive - Do any of your divisions compete directly with any of ours? Because I’ll be fired at the next board meeting if they read in the WSJ that we’re funding an adversary.
Cost is negotiable, what is a UI?, and sorry, I don’t care if all of the above is good but Azure isn’t the engineers’ favorite thing. Y’all work for me.
I’m an engineer on the vendor side that begrudgingly got promoted into CTO role where I was helping get deals done with F100 c-levels. So I know how these people think. I hated it, left enterprise a few years ago and never looked back.