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Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

zdnet.com

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Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#41

Leave it up to Microsoft to find out ways to profit more during a pandemic, rather than open sourcing their software and platform to be used anywhere and everywhere. People forgot what hosting is like without these massively overpriced cloud services that nickel and dime for every feature. Want encryption which basically costs nothing? Oh, you'll pay an extra $0.10 per hour on top of your $.08GB of outbound traffic.…

Office (/Microsoft) 365 is a pretty good value for what it is. It isn’t free, but $20 per user per month for Windows + Office + Exchange + OneDrive + Azure AD and support is pretty good.

Microsoft saying “Ahh! Crisis! Here’s the Windows Server codebase!” wouldn’t help, since you’d have to still find a host and time to make sure your code works on this upstream variant without all of the licensed DLLs that makes Windows work.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#42

Honest question; how do you define "demand"?

Maybe start by clicking the link?

> In a March 28 blog post, officials said that demand for its new Windows Virtual Desktop usage has grown by more than three times. They also said government use of public Power BI for sharing COVID-19 dashboads is up 42 percent in a week. (As is the case with Microsoft's overall cloud services figure, we don't have a base number for WVD and Power BI from which to calculate these percentages.)

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#43
post #37
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different in what way? Slack has built-in video conferencing?

Slack’s video conferencing sucks. They bought ScreenHero and tried to integrate it. They screwed it up so bad that the ScreenHero founder quit after 4 years and has gone and rewrote it and called it Screen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22676040

Yeah Slack themselves use Zoom. Slack is a channel based messaging tool, it integrates with best of class video tools like Zoom and file storage tools like Box or even SharePoint.

Teams does it all OKish, although the channel based messaging is probably the worst part.

It's sort of wrong to look at Teams as a Slack replacement. Well, it is for who just want chat, and don't care about channel messaging.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not.. The market is not sane atm. It's 100% emotion.

What makes you think that? Have you seen a discrepancy between your projections of future cash flows and therefore your valuation, as compared to the value the market is at right now?

They’re mainly a software / services company. There’s no reason their revenue will drop, the contrary..

Yet the stock price has the exact same changes as the rest of the entire market.

Their cloud demand is up x7.. it’s not priced in. Amazon same thing, although less so imho

Their current p/e is 26. Remove cash and it’s nearing 20.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#46
post #17
post #2

Why would Microsoft be disproportionately affected by this? Are we expecting similar decrees from AWS and GCP? Or was Microsoft operating with less runway before this began?

Working with all three of them, so here's my two cents: 1. Mostly traditional, "legacy" companies have been hit hard by this. Ones that don't have culture or technology of work-from-home. Those companies use some Microsoft products. Also, Microsoft has been poaching them heavily, handing out trials, bundling licenses and so on. A lot of them don't actually buy stuff from Microsoft, but through 3rd party vendors which…

I think Azure also has more regions than AWS, but yet a smaller overall capacity probably, so it's gotta be harder to keep space capacity. It's notable the shortages are isolated to specific regions. They were possibly small to start and so it probably didn't take as much to hit capacity there? Just a guess.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#47

Wow. First of all, I'm curious to what proportions this is driven primarily by remote office work (O365), videoconferencing streaming, recreational video streaming (does Disney+ run on Azure?), or what. But second... I'm fascinated by the concept of prioritization rules in place rather than simply raising prices. I wonder if it "looks bad" to raise prices, or if the vast majority of customers already have locked-in p…

> I'm fascinated by the concept of prioritization rules in place rather than simply raising prices Do you realise that it's potentially illegal to increase prices based on market demand during a crisis?

Right. It's important to the public that scarce goods instead by allocated by willingness to stand in line. What does standing in line mean for a corporation that could be anywhere in the world? Maybe some kind of proof-of-work scheme for the CEO or majority owner?

Azure could service VM creation requests in the order of their creation, but "take a number" doesn't work as well. The opportunity cost of what else you could be doing with the time spent waiting in line is the "price" that allows the market to clear.

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#48

Honest question; how do you define "demand"?

Maybe start by clicking the link? > In a March 28 blog post, officials said that demand for its new Windows Virtual Desktop usage has grown by more than three times. They also said government use of public Power BI for sharing COVID-19 dashboads is up 42 percent in a week. (As is the case with Microsoft's overall cloud services figure, we don't have a base number for WVD and Power BI from which to calculate these per…

It still doesnt define demand. Is that new sales or what?

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#49
post #15

Time to buy MS stock.

I don’t know about that. Long MSFT short AAPL perhaps. But if we believe that the lockdowns will last 2 months+, and if we believe the economic forecasts, we are facing a crisis worse than 2008. Even good stocks sink in those markets. The 30% drop we have seen so far barely reversed Trump’s rally. I don’t know that a severe recession is priced in yet.

2 months? Try 2 years. It's a year minimum before we get a handle on this (no, not the vaccine, just the virus itself).

Re: Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

#50

Wow. First of all, I'm curious to what proportions this is driven primarily by remote office work (O365), videoconferencing streaming, recreational video streaming (does Disney+ run on Azure?), or what. But second... I'm fascinated by the concept of prioritization rules in place rather than simply raising prices. I wonder if it "looks bad" to raise prices, or if the vast majority of customers already have locked-in p…

>does Disney+ run on Azure? Some cursory web searching suggests that at least as of 2017, BAMTECH / Disney were using AWS as their public cloud provider. There's enough inertia here that you'd imagine that this is still the case.

From here in Australia, developer tools tells me the video is coming from vod-akc-oc-east-1.media.dssott.com which appears to be an Akamai thing.
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