Actually, it's quite a lot more than just retiring the pricing model.

They're retiring the entire SQL Reporting facility! Looks like either they couldn't find a way to change the model to something sensible, or (more likely) they rode the model down to crash and burn. :rolleyes:

Now, you gotta build your own Azure VM . . . which means your own SQL Server licence . . which means I can't see any advantage to Azure over (say) a VMware appliance. Can you?

I mean, this is a big change. I see it as giving up on PaaS and moving to IaaS. Or is there another way to look at it?