It’s not often you write “Microsoft(s msft)” and”open” in the same sentence but, well, these are special times. The company is straining to make its Azure cloud service a bona fide rival to Google Cloud(s goog) and Amazon Web Services(s amzn), and believes that offering customers openness and options are one way it can stand out.

“It’s a change from the historical Microsoft by embracing openness in a new way,” said Scott Guthrie, EVP of the company’s cloud and enterprise group, speaking Wednesday at Gigaom Structure in San Francisco.

Guthrie pointed out that Azure offers tools for clients to run Linux and a wide variety of SDK’s, and touted its drag-and-drop machine tools for machine learning as a “democratic” way for companies to get more analytics.

Despite this pledge to play well with others, Microsoft still faces a challenge in getting non-Windows shops to give Azure a try rather than turning to the more…