Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

lastweekinaws.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 166 posts

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#91

Post by drucik »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #85
ineedasername wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because giving something more to the customer would not cost them anything. There used to be this belief that things are worth as much as the cost to produce them + some margin for the maker. And things were made so they will benefit their consumers. Unfortunately more and more companies these days look for ways to get not what something is worth but to get from consumers as much as possible, to squeeze them like lemons.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#92

Post by soulofmischief »

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, it isn't okay for NVIDIA to try and charge me tens of thousands for a quadro card instead of just letting me virtualize my Geforce 1080.

In fact, it's so not okay, that I don't play ball and I use hacks to get my 1080 support virtualization and pass-through.

It's also not okay for Apple to restrict what hardware I can run their software with. I have run hackintoshes and OS X VMs.

I voice my support and concern for these vendors' policies appropriately by using my wallet. The policies you listed are not okay.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#93

Post by FactolSarin »

Nullabillity wrote: post #64
misterdoubt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but that's not happening here. The Windows license change doesn't retroactively apply to existing licenses.

It does apply to existing customers as soon as they need to scale out. Well, unless they decide to pay down their tech debt and get out ASAP.

Maybe they shouldn't have used an on- premise lisence in the cloud in the first place

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#94

Post by BowBun »

holtalanm wrote: post #87
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.

When you realize their objective is the commoditization of software and software development to further increase your dependence on their ecosystem (it's not just Windows anymore, it's Azure and the IDE and their other tools), it seems a lot less benevolent. No company worth their salt does anything for free, there's always a reason.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#95

Post by femto113 »

tw04 wrote: post #88
tedivm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This practice is a form of "bundling" in the antitrust sense, and while it is not inherently illegal different rules apply to such behaviors if you've been found to have monopoly powers.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#97

Post by soulofmischief »

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.

In my case, NVIDIA released a "bug" in the driver years ago which disabled the ability of Geforce cards to run in virtualized environments.

They have not addressed or fixed this "bug", and instead point consumers to their ridiculously expensive Quadro cards, which are prohibitively expensive not to mention overkill for most consumers.

This "bug" can be fixed in some hypervisors, for example in KVM, by spoofing certain system information.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#98

Post by mcguire »

ineedasername wrote: post #74
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.

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 choo…

One thing this article gets right is that this seems to be a move back towards the good old "Where do we want you to go today?" Microsoft of yore.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#99

Post by tialaramex »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #82
slowmovintarget wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Right, take the Intel i486 chips. Intel sold 486SX, and 486DX chips, plus a 487DX. Now, as far as an end user was concerned, the 486DX was a CPU as you'd think of it today with integrated FPU (relatively novel at the time in desktop) the 486SX was missing an FPU (still fine to run workloads that were at the time predominantly integer only) and the 487DX was an upgrade to make your 486SX have an FPU

But that was never what was really going on, all these were the same CPU design, except that when yield rates for the FPU weren't so good Intel disabled it and sold those as the 486SX. When sales of the 486SX outstripped supply of dodgy FPU 486DXs Intel removed the FPU altogether from new ones. Meanwhile the 487DX wasn't "upgrading" anything, it just disabled the 486SX and replaced it with a full CPU.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#100

Post by mattferderer »

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?

I highly recommend non-profits do it. Azure gives awesome deals to non-profits! https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/azure
Post reply on HN