The signal to noise ratio of the article is very low.
See the linked https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/05/microsoft_licensing... Register article.
Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike
101–110 of 166 posts
Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 lem…
It's a business decision which will make them more money.
In Universe A they sell only the most powerful version of the product for 1x price and them make some money.
In Universe B they sell the most powerful for 1x AND a slightly less powerful version for 0.9x price and they make MORE overall profit.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing. There are customers who will want to pay less and not need the most powerful product.
I fail to see how the company in Universe B is morally worse than those in Universe A. One could argue they are superior, in that they offer more choices.
Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike
#103The 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.
I admit my experience is mostly with JS deployed on Linux, but ASP.NET seems like a good framework with awesome tooling. Also using the same language on the frontend and backend is very useful and I consider C# the best option for Windows frontend work.
Not that I'm saying NodeJS backend with Website/Electron frontend is bad, but ASP.NET backend with WPF frontend seems great as well, just with more enterprise-oriented trade-offs, support cycles longer than one year but no cross-platform support (yes, ASP.NET core is a thing now, but that's a very recent development).
And compared to the cost of engineers I don't think many companies are that worried about spending 50% more on infrastructure.
Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike
#104I wonder, if Microsoft did decided to increase the costs of it's product and services what's the best way to that?
To me, that's all that's happening here. And the licenses purchase buy customer in the past weren't intended for Cloud Workloads. Sure, it didn't outline that you CANT use on AWS, GCP, etc. but that wasn't the intent.
Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... 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…
So??
A customer is buying X features for Y dollars. It doesn't matter if certain other features are there and disabled, because that's not what the customer paid for.
Software does this all the time as well. Say you get the first three levels of a game for free. You have to pay to get an unlock code for all ten levels. Is it unfair that you really got the whole game for free and that you are being kept from accessing it unless you pay?
If you get the features you pay for, then the transaction was legitimate. Fin.
Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike
#106Earlier 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.
You say it like that and it sounds bad, but you say it like "Microsoft offers a discount if you bundle cloud and license spending" and it sounds pretty fair to me. Goodness knows there are a lot of other cloud options than Microsoft. If you're tightly coupled with one vendor you're gonna be at their mercy.
When you have a monopoly on Y, it is not fair to offer a discount on a bundle of X and Y. The problem is not the general idea of a discount bundle, it's leveraging a monopoly to get more business in a different market.
Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 lem…
Key error in your argument: "would not cost them anything."
Of course they would lose profit on the customers that would pay for X instead of .8X. "if i can buy the same hardware at 20% less cost why would I buy it at the full cost?"
Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike
#108Earlier 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, 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…
> 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.
In fact, it's so not okay, that I don't play ball and buy Radeon. Vote with your wallet.
Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about the license makes Azure specifically cheaper? Does it call out Azure specifically? Or rather, you can use the on-prem license in the cloud, but only on dedicated hardware? If so, Azure Dedicated Instances would be able to use that form of the license, but why not AWS which also has a dedicated hardware option?
From the blog post[0]: > Azure Hybrid Benefit for Azure only [0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/updated-licen...
Azure Hybrid Benefit is for licenses with Software Assurance. The change that the blog post keeps railing on about is for licenses without Software Assurance.
Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Maybe they should have used Wine in the first place.