Microsoft has announced price cuts on its compute facility by up to 35% and its storage by up to 65%, days after Google and Amazon Web Services did likewise.

Perhaps this is the least surprising news of the year – Amazon’s price cuts being the second least surprising. That said, everyone suspected Redmond’s cloud announcement wasn’t going to be just renaming Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure.

In a blog post, Azure general manager Stephen Martin outlined the price changes yet added there were two other key factors at play; innovation and quality.

“Innovation and quality will prove far more important than commoditisation of compute and storage,” he wrote. “Vendors will ultimately extol their track records for building and running services far more than their prices and SLAs.”

Regardless, even if the prices aren’t that important they’re being outlined here, being handily compared to the AWS stable …