The real question is why do they need to expand so fast?  Other besides they are going after the cloud for more than just gaming. What will be used for live and PSN should be fairly even and not make much of a difference for the end user. Sony will expand theirs over time, no need to spend a billion right now. MS is just throwing around cash figures to get people impressed. In fact they are spending so much on BS that I don’t ever see them making any money back from the entire xbox project. What are they doing for the LOLZ?

http://gaikai.com/history Scroll thru the time line, It happened right before Sony bought them.

"largest gaming cloud service" is not a huge deal when you consider OnLive has a pretty small amount of penetration (you have to live within 1000 miles or so of their 5 datacenters to get good service) and the only other cloud gaming service is what... Big Fish Unlimited? It pales in comparison to the size of Azure.

Last we saw of Gaikai the service was decent. We'll see f it improves for PS4.

The only Cloud that matters is Strife:

Gaikai was pretty damn decenct. It allowed me to stream the witcher 2 over a 3g data card with limited lag. Sure it was there but i was also using a 3g usb stick at the time. Now that i have half decent intrenet i'm really intrested to see what it does. Who cares about Azure? Dosn't matter when it comes to games. Like i said the end user wont know the difference between the two.

MS would be wasting a lot of money if their big cloud infrastructure was even with Gaikai, so much so that users "wouldn't notice a difference".

Of course, Gaikai is for streaming games and they did a decent job. Not the same thing MS's cloud does.

Servers are servers. Nothing more. With the right code ms could stream games just as well as gaikia and gaikai can run dedicated servers just the same. Nothing more and nothing less. The only "advantage" would be the size of MS cloud. And that only and advantage if there’s enough users to take use of it. But right now both install bases are zero and won’t grow fast enough to warrant the massive amount of money being spent by MS. Sony doesn’t need to dump a billion dollars in it right now. Just invest in it as the service grows and stay a head of the curve and no one would know otherwise.

Let me make this simple :

Gaikai is all gaming cloud, nothing else.

MS cloud is used for many, many others things including gaming. 

Which makes the idea that Sony can emulate what MS does just because "they have Gaikai" a silly notion.

Off topic wtf I need to download a system update so I can toggle trophy notification? lol

MS doesnt need a big install base to reap the rewards of their cloud. Gaming is only one part of it, business and governments are the rest. That was my point, but having multiple uses it allows MS to invest more than sony could as there is no benifit to sony for the extra servers. I was talking about cloud services, not game cloud services when I was talking about size. When I do research on cloud companies gaikai has never been mentioned in any cpapcity except for here. MS is the second biggest player in the cloud market and already has the need for all of the data centers, using for xbox live is an added bonus.

And it's still dosn't mean some how it's going to be better for playing games. I dont care about anything else MS cloud can do and most gamers wont.