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Satya Nadella speaks at Microsoft Ignite 2016 (Photo by GeekWire/Kevin Lisota)

Microsoft is a huge multinational technology company, with lines of business spread across PCs, productivity software, gaming, internet search, and more. But after its third fiscal quarter earnings report came out yesterday, financial analysts spent most of their time asking about a very specific business.

Questions about Microsoft Azure and associated cloud services dominated Microsofts financial results call yesterday afternoon. By contrast, market leader Amazon Web Services only came up a handful of times during the Amazon call with analysts, which makes some sense given that AWS is already a well-understood component of Amazons overall business.

For Microsoft watchers, this shift is a little newer. The company still doesnt break out revenue for Azure (come on, folks, its about time) but said Azure revenue nearly doubled compared to last year, and CEO Satya Nadella was peppered with questions about Azure and cloud growth in general.

Heres a few of his answers, courtesy of a transcript from Seeking Alpha:

On the evolution of the cloud: For example, right when everyones talking about the cloud, the most interesting part is the edge of the cloud. Whether its IoT, whether its the auto industry, whether its whats happening in retail, essentially compute is going where the data gets generated, and increasingly data is getting generated at the volumes in which its drawing compute to it, which is the edge.

On cloud holdouts: But we do have a huge on-premise base. There is still a need for those on-premise products. That will continue, but our focus is on transitioning to the cloud.

On short-term thinking: These are generational opportunities that whats at play when it comes to the Intelligent Cloud or whats happening in augmented reality. Either one of those things, I think if we started viewing it quarter to quarter or year to year, well completely miss the trend.

But I completely understand that all of you measure us to what we have done for you lately. And thats a fine way and well keep account of it, but thats not how it works.

On enterprises moving to the cloud: its not about in fact taking any old workload per se, but its about reimagining what they want to do across these. And in that context, of course, theyre lifting and shifting some of the older workloads, but theyre modernizing the entire business process flow. And thats whats I think (is) the killer opportunity, not any one technology, but the entire flow.

Read more:
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outlines its cloud computing strategy for Wall Street - GeekWire