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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

#111

Post by JustSomeNobody »

drucik wrote: post #91
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #85

Earlier 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…

> Because giving something more to the customer would not cost them anything.

Even if that were true, so what? Some customers are willing to trade less features for less money. It doesn't matter that other features are present but disabled. Those customers got exactly what they paid for. They're not getting cheaped out on.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#112

Post by pjmlp »

soulofmischief wrote: post #92
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, 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…

That is not voting with your wallet.

Voting with your wallet would be not using anything from NVidia and Apple to start with, including the business opportunities it might entail.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#113

Post by Strom »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #106
Raidion wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Microsoft doesn't have anything even remotely resembling a monopoly on server OSes.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#114

Post by traskjd »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #106
Raidion wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is Microsoft a monopoly on Server operating systems? I’d say no, and not by a long shot. Even on Azure, Linux is more than 50% of their workloads.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#115

Post by toyg »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #106
Raidion wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair, this affects the server market, where MS was never really a monopolist.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#116

Post by oxfordmale »

wongarsu wrote: post #103
oxfordmale wrote: post #84

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.

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-oriente…

Legacy ASP.NET web pages might be harder to migrate, however, newer web sites can also be implemented using ASP.NET Core MVC. It seems other departments in Microsoft do understand that their code base needs to be able to run on a Linux OS, otherwise they are at risk of losing market share. Even SQL Server can run on Linux now.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#117

Post by mark-r »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #105
tialaramex wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think anybody's claiming it's illegal. Just questioning whether it's a smart move on Microsoft's part.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#118

Post by jbigelow76 »

The whole "won't somebody think of the poor advocates" angle seems pretty thin to me, tossed in to gin up a little unearned outrage. Did all these advocates all take big pay cuts to leave Amazon, Oracle, Salesforce, etc... to go and preach the gospel of Azure? I doubt it.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#119

Post by toyg »

oxfordmale wrote: post #84

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.

It’s not about “difficulty”, it’s that those apps are mostly Windows-only. Until very recently, incentives to build enterprise/professional shrinkwrap applications on platforms that weren’t Windows, were basically non-existent. That’s billions of dollars in software that will never be ported.

Re: Microsoft Screws Azure Customers and Its Own Advocates Alike

#120

Post by scarface74 »

I love that Microsoft is doing this.

I was an exclusive Microsoft developer for almost 20 years until I started doing cloud deployments to AWS 2 years ago. Before then, server costs were someone else's problem. Now I’m doing a combination of .Net Core, Python, and JS/Node.

I realized that everything gets worse when you add Windows to any cloud solution - licensing costs, resource requirements, (I can do at lot with a very small Linux instance, Windows not so much), performance, startup times, easy scripting and automation, etc.

It gives me more of a reason to tell companies to move as far away from Windows on the server as possible.

I still develop on Windows,C#/.Net Core is my favorite language, don’t know much about Linux, and all of my “Linux deployments” are serverless with Docker/Fargate or Lambda.

I don’t have to worry about “server administration”, the one thing that kept me on Windows. We use managed services.

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