Amazon catches a storm in the cloud, but ‘significant fear’ may mean opportunity

Is Microsoft Corp. raining on Amazon.com Inc.’s parade in cloud computing?

That’s a key question coming out of Amazon’s AMZN late Thursday earnings report, as the technology giant’s chief financial officer warned that April growth rates for the AWS cloud-computing unit were running 500 basis points lower than what was seen in the first quarter, which brought a slowdown of its own. It seemed a more severe message than what Microsoft Corp. MSFT executives struck earlier in the week.

…