Redmond-based Microsoft has cut the price of Azure storage as you go service and some of its cloud computing offerings. The announcement and cuts went into effect Friday, which is only a few days following Amazon Web Services storage price slash. The decrease is on par with an apparent trend that it may not be too long before cloud computing rates par electricity rates.

As to the particulars of the pricing that Microsoft released, Windows Azure Storage Pay-As-You-Go pricing has been reduced by 12 percent ($0.14 to $0.125); 6 Month Plans for Windows Azure Storage have been reduced across all tiers by up to 14%; Windows Azure Extra Small Compute has been reduced by 50% ($.04 to .$02).

Microsoft said the same thing as Amazon about the price cut: passing savings onto customer. And HP has yet to get into the compute-cloud industry so this isn’t the lowest the prices can dive.

Just to add, this isn’t the first time Azure has cut prices. Prices also dropped in October 2011 to reach out to small and SME developers, as well as build a developer community that runs on smaller app on its Azure platform.

In retrospect, Azure cloud platform had some hard luck two weeks ago as it suffered an outage. It lasted for seven hours which started on the evening of February 28 to morning of February 29.

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley said there was glimmer of light coming back to Azure’s system. There seems like a craggy patch going on.

“On February 28th, 2012at 5:45 PM PST Microsoft became aware of an issue impacting Windows Azure service management in a number of regions.  Windows Azure engineering teams developed, validated and deployed a fix that resolved the issue for the majority of our customers. Some customers in 3 sub regions – North Central US, South Central and North Europe – remain affected.  Engineering teams are actively working to resolve the issue as soon as possible  We will update the Service Dashboard, hourly until this incident is resolved.”

With these competitive pricing plans occurring across consumer and enterprise-level cloud computing and storage, we may probably see a plateau occur. The instability across both Amazon’s could and the Azure cloud are still yet to be shaken out; but they’re used heavily across the industry (both consumer and enterprise) but users will likely stick to the vendor who gives them everything they need, at the price they can afford, as long as they keep them online.

Outages currently only look like part of growing pains.

Price cuts reflect an attempt to reach a broader base and stay competitive in the face of multiple cloud-computing and -storage vendors working in the same space.