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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

#81

Post by abarringer »

bogwog wrote: post #65
abarringer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you run windows doesn't mean you like it. SQL Server, vendor app requirements etc. A windowless world is about as likely as a paperless bathroom and for the same reasons. Also, not sure what huge risk you are talking about here besides licensing pricing?

> Also, not sure what huge risk you are talking about here besides licensing pricing? The many business risks of being 100% tied down to a single provider (Microsoft). Licensing is one, but also what would happen if Microsoft decided to kill off a service that your product depends on? You'd have to invest in finding an alternative and rewriting your software. Or what if Microsoft sells that service to another company…

Both replies to me earlier comment mentioned vendor lock in. Is there any greater vendor lock-in then integrating AWS thousand and one services? Is it really riskier to trust MS to not kill a product then Google? Is the answer really to write everything yourself from the OS up?

I don't disagree that MS could do any of what you mentioned but I'm not sure AWS/GCP etc wouldn't be as likely to as well.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#82

Post by JustSomeNobody »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #73
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.

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.

> ... 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.

If one is able to get a less expensive, albeit less powerful, device for cheaper, is there any difference?

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#83

Post by pas »

ineedasername wrote: post #69

In a situation like this, if you're not willing to take the price hit on the chin in the long term, there's about two options: Change your cloud provider (to Azure) or change your platform (away from windows). It seems MS is betting there will be, on net, more people who take it on the chin &/or switch to Azure. But even if they're right, there will still be some loss of marketshare for those staying with AWS & ditch…

Or... people will just pay a bit more to MS and stay on AWS.

It's not like AWS and Windows are for the cost conscious.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#84

Post by oxfordmale »

The real question is why companies are still running Windows Servers in the cloud. It is already 50% more expensive to run Windows Server on AWS compared to a Linux based OS, so I can really only justify running Windows Server for legacy applications that are too difficult to migrate. Actually I am happy with this price increase, it will give me some leverage to migrate the remaining applications away from Windows.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#85

Post by JustSomeNobody »

ineedasername wrote: post #75
DannyB2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

Why is it not ok to disable some features on a device and sell it cheaper?

How is this anti-competitive? How is this customer-unfriendly?

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#86

Post by pathartl »

davedx wrote: post #51
grezql wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.net core, which the flagship of the future, is cross platform. I am running it in ubuntu production environment for an App i made. Very stable.

Yes and no. I work on some ASP .NET applications and on a big .net core project. The .net core project indeed runs fine on Linux in AWS. It's a great success story for us. The ASP .NET projects I maintain have a budget that doesn't easily allow us to just migrate them to .net core. There are some hairy legacy libs and code in there that would also prove challenging to resolve too.

Yeah, this right here. I work on a MVC 5 app that uses some pretty large legacy libraries that's going to be hard to move from. Some of it is legacy stuff that may or may not have a .NET Core or .NET Standard equivalent. Others like Entity Framework have a Core equivalent that changes some paradigms to be a bit more modern, but ultimately creates a situation where it's not a drop in replacement.

There's also the question of SQL server. It's not so much of an issue when you're dealing with Azure, but SQL server on Linux isn't ready for prime time yet IMO.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#87

Post by holtalanm »

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?

I genuinely believe that Microsoft is at least making an effort to not be the 'Microsoft of old'.

Also, them open-sourcing a lot of their tools seems to back that effort up:

VSCode

TypeScript

.NET Core

Powershell Core

Just to name a few.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#88

Post by tw04 »

tedivm wrote: post #34
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…

It's worse than you're describing- Microsoft is charging one licensing price if you're on their cloud but another price if you're on someone elses. This anticompetitive behavior is what we expected from Microsoft in the 90s and early 2000s.

Can you name a business that doesn't offer you a discount commensurate to the amount you spend with them? Why wouldn't Microsoft give you a discount on your windows license if you're also using their cloud?

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#89

Post by tw04 »

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.

I think you're going to run out of options pretty quickly outside of what Amazon writes in-house then. The alternative isn't a sustainable business model.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#90

Post by slang800 »

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.

This is just whataboutism. Other companies doing bad things doesn't make Microsoft's bad things any less bad.
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