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Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

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Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#71

Post by orf »

ryanisnan wrote: post #40
Traster wrote: post #7

Well this article doesn't seem very good. Not least because the author seems perfectly willing to not actually explain the detail, and then jump to conclusions. Having read the actual detailed article what seems to be happening is that some customers buy "on-premises licenses" without mobility rights, and MSFT used to let them use those licenses on outsourced hardware. But people were using those licenses to just put…

If your license differentiates between running on a physical box of my own versus someone else's physical box (cloud computing), I don't want to use your software. I think most developers would tend to agree.

It's lucky for Microsoft that the people receiving and paying the bills are far removed from the developers.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#72

Post by arnvald »

drummyfish wrote: post #16

> the bad old days of Microsoft being an anti-competitive bully are dead and buried. Wait, there are people who genuinely believe this?

You'd be surprised. When I interview developers in their early 20s, they say Microsoft is great because they created Typescript and VS Code, and now they'll make web devs' lives easier by embracing Chromium.

I once interviewed at a young fintech company that proudly said they're Microsoft-first company (ie they use .net stack, azure, outlook and ms teams etc)

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#73

Post by slowmovintarget »

belltaco wrote: post #18
Someone1234 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to think simply re-stating the facts is enough to dismiss the article. But you forgot to tell us WHY it is acceptable for Microsoft to charge their customers a premium for using their fully purchased licenses on a cloud provider of their choice rather than dedicated physical hardware. And why it is ok for Microsoft to create an artificial monopoly for these licenses via Azure Dedicated Host. Microsoft sold l…

Why is it okay for Nvidia to disable parts of a fully working chip in order to sell it as a more popular and cheaper part? Why is it okay for them to disable features in the PC vs Workstation drivers on the same hardware that you bought? Why is it okay for Apple to legally restrict OS X from running inside a VM or on a PC? Welcome to price differentiation.

Regarding Nvidia, is this just a straight disable of full-function chips? Some vendors will sell chips with reduced function because it permits them to sell chips with defects that disable only specific functions, where the rest of the chip is fine.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#74

Post by ineedasername »

belltaco wrote: post #18
Someone1234 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to think simply re-stating the facts is enough to dismiss the article. But you forgot to tell us WHY it is acceptable for Microsoft to charge their customers a premium for using their fully purchased licenses on a cloud provider of their choice rather than dedicated physical hardware. And why it is ok for Microsoft to create an artificial monopoly for these licenses via Azure Dedicated Host. Microsoft sold l…

Why is it okay for Nvidia to disable parts of a fully working chip in order to sell it as a more popular and cheaper part? Why is it okay for them to disable features in the PC vs Workstation drivers on the same hardware that you bought? Why is it okay for Apple to legally restrict OS X from running inside a VM or on a PC? Welcome to price differentiation.

Well, there's "okay" in the legal/contractual sense and there's "okay" in the customer-friendly, long term interests of the company. This move may be the former, but not the later, and MS seems to be banking on gaining more revenue for these licenses & switches to Azure than they lose when some customers decide to stick with AWS but move away from Windows. Either way, some group of customers, however small, will choose to move away from Windows, so their long term market share will be smaller. Is this "okay"? Depends on which way MS has placed its bets.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#75

Post by ineedasername »

DannyB2 wrote: post #55
belltaco wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it okay for Nvidia to disable parts of a fully working chip in order to sell it as a more popular and cheaper part? Why is it okay for them to disable features in the PC vs Workstation drivers on the same hardware that you bought? Why is it okay for Apple to legally restrict OS X from running inside a VM or on a PC? Welcome to price differentiation.

> Why is it okay for . . . . It's not okay.

Yeah, pointing to annoying, anti-competitive, customer-unfriendly practices the happen to exist doesn't make them "okay". It only means companies aren't prohibited by law/contract from doing them. Only in that sense are they "okay"

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#76

Post by secabeen »

libria wrote: post #33
Someone1234 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to think simply re-stating the facts is enough to dismiss the article. But you forgot to tell us WHY it is acceptable for Microsoft to charge their customers a premium for using their fully purchased licenses on a cloud provider of their choice rather than dedicated physical hardware. And why it is ok for Microsoft to create an artificial monopoly for these licenses via Azure Dedicated Host. Microsoft sold l…

What irks me about this is I like to ride as close as I can to the fantasy of SDE == 8 hours of problem solving. Meetings, sprint ceremonies, interruptions I've come to deal with as baggage that comes with the territory. But when I have to blow the dust off my olde Microsoft Licensing Nits and Pitfalls Tome and play license-lawyer again, that really sucks the life out of me. Windows Server is a great product and I wa…

> Windows Server is a great product and I want to pay great money and use it without worrying about where in the cloud it's floating

If that's the case, just use the windows license that's provided to you when you spin up an instance with your cloud provider. This is only for people using dedicated instances.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#77

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

shyneeup wrote: post #3

Now I am curious, who runs production customer facing apps on Azure? I'm assuming many people do given that Azure is second after AWS in market share or is that really just mostly corporate IT servers?

We do. We're a non-profit, and a few years ago we went cloud-provider hunting. Microsoft was willing to be generous with us in a way that Amazon was not. Not only in terms of non-profit friendly pricing, but also in terms of incidentals -- trainings, related services/pricing, and so on. Amazon offered no concessions at all, so it was kind of a no-brainer for our CTO and board.

So everything we host is Azure. We are a relatively small outfit, but a fair chunk of our 'stuff' is customer-facing. We haven't had any negative experiences yet at all and it's been a few years now.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#78

Post by jiveturkey »

Traster wrote: post #7

Well this article doesn't seem very good. Not least because the author seems perfectly willing to not actually explain the detail, and then jump to conclusions. Having read the actual detailed article what seems to be happening is that some customers buy "on-premises licenses" without mobility rights, and MSFT used to let them use those licenses on outsourced hardware. But people were using those licenses to just put…

> Basically, MSFT is just catching up to the fact

I very much doubt they are just catching up. This was planned for years (if not a decade).

The thought process being, as everyone virtualizes their compute to the cloud, any cloud, make it easy for them to stay on their existing Windows license. Well, they couldn't prevent it anyway. So in fact, they actively encouraged it. This way you don't lose that customer forever (as they transition to Linux or other, but generally Linux). The customer is happy, the move is endorsed by MS, they only have to deal with the one transition and they can decide freely on cloud provider, which feels like freedom. Part of the plan being, hope the customer moves their Windows workload to Azure, with an expectation that it would be least-effort.

Now that the bulk of the shift (to cloud) has occurred, differentiate the licensing.

IMHO this is a trumped up complaint about change. Microsoft did in part bring this uproar upon themselves by making the scheme complicated, but at least part of that was unavoidable (given that they want to make moar monies).

Please note:

> Multi-tenant hosts are not affected.

which is likely most uses. It's only dedicated hosting (and only for "listed providers") that are affected. And Azure is included. The apparent escape valve of Azure Hybrid Benefit isn't much of one ... you have to pay for the AHB and you have to have software assurance. The same as on the other providers. This is how they will (rightly) escape any claims of anti-competitive behavior.

In a nutshell, for customers that care enough to want a dedicated (vs multi-tenant) host, which BTW Azure hasn't ever had before, that's the kind of customer that cares enough to closely mind their licenses. MSFT is now going to insist on collecting the annual software assurance fee from those customers. This is probably motivated by the ease of spinning up new cloud instances, vs new on-premise hardware. With cloud, it's oh so easy to exceed your paid-for license usage. At least if they force the software assurance fees, they collect a larger fraction of fees.

TFA is a low information rant, and even declares itself as such:

> The longer version is complex, nuanced, and exceeds my attention span

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#79

Post by erk__ »

ryanisnan wrote: post #40
Traster wrote: post #7

Well this article doesn't seem very good. Not least because the author seems perfectly willing to not actually explain the detail, and then jump to conclusions. Having read the actual detailed article what seems to be happening is that some customers buy "on-premises licenses" without mobility rights, and MSFT used to let them use those licenses on outsourced hardware. But people were using those licenses to just put…

If your license differentiates between running on a physical box of my own versus someone else's physical box (cloud computing), I don't want to use your software. I think most developers would tend to agree.

Does that also mean that you don't want to use redis or MongoDB after the changes they have made to their license?

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#80

Post by cbhl »

belltaco wrote: post #18
Someone1234 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to think simply re-stating the facts is enough to dismiss the article. But you forgot to tell us WHY it is acceptable for Microsoft to charge their customers a premium for using their fully purchased licenses on a cloud provider of their choice rather than dedicated physical hardware. And why it is ok for Microsoft to create an artificial monopoly for these licenses via Azure Dedicated Host. Microsoft sold l…

Why is it okay for Nvidia to disable parts of a fully working chip in order to sell it as a more popular and cheaper part? Why is it okay for them to disable features in the PC vs Workstation drivers on the same hardware that you bought? Why is it okay for Apple to legally restrict OS X from running inside a VM or on a PC? Welcome to price differentiation.

My read on this is that this is really "price simplification". If you want to run Windows on the big public clouds, you used to have three options:

(1) rent a VM with a license bundled into the per-minute/per-hour rate

(2) bring-your-own-license on "dedicated hardware"

(3) pay for software assurance

Looks like Microsoft is now phasing out (2), so now basically anyone who isn't large enough to have software assurance has only one price: the all-inclusive per-vm per-hour/minute rate.

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