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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

#61

Post by ajcodez »

sneak wrote: post #56
salex89 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But the thing I'm mostly pissed of is the status page. VM's are failing left, right and center and everything is nice and green on the status page. Once you open a ticket, they send you an incident-in-progress report. Status pages parroting lies in service of marketing should incur more liability for companies than they do. How does a society discourage vendors from doing things like this?

It should eventually fall under consumer protection laws. Failing to report incidents on a status page is like failing to mention trans fat on a package label.

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

#62

Post by bachmeier »

closeparen wrote: post #47
chrisseaton wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> It's important to the public that scarce goods instead by allocated by willingness to stand in line.

It's important to keep in mind that a higher price is unlikely to lead to much additional capacity due to the nature of this shock. Companies have to do business with their customers for many years after this is over. "Sorry, we're overloaded with demand due to this crisis" sounds a lot better than "Pay us ten times as much during the crisis or go f* yourself." Microsoft isn't in business to allocate resources according to a simplistic strategy pulled from an intro econ course, they're in business to make money over a period of many years.

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

#63

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #48
KennethSRoberts wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Utilization.

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

#64

Post by mardifoufs »

ShinTakuya wrote: post #49
cm2187 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That's ludicrous. If you were right we wouldn't have a stock market by then. We wouldn't even have an economy after 1 year of lock downs, even if they were on and off. There's a point where we just won't be able to isolate and if the virus stays dangerous we will be forced to just take the risk.

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

#65

Post by gmanley »

x0x0 wrote: post #52
burkaman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would certainly look bad, and I think it would potentially be illegal in some states. https://consumer.findlaw.com/consumer-transactions/price-gou... For example, Georgia: > Selling items or services determined by the Governor during a declared state of emergency to be necessary for public safety at a higher cost than they were immediately prior to the declaration. Kansas: > For any supplier of a "necessary proper…

They aren't raising prices; they're limiting availability. All three quoted laws solely cover prices.

This thread is discussing the hypothetical legality if they did raise prices.

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

#66

Post by Kye »

jedieaston wrote: post #41
techntoke wrote: post #33

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 Windo…

Plus, you don't have to use Windows on Azure. Linux instances are cheaper.

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

#67

Post by RustyBucket »

empath75 wrote: post #32
gundmc wrote: 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?

A significant percent of Microsoft’s ‘cloud’ division is office and sharepoint and the like. I’m sure thatusage is through the roof right now.

Sharepoint Online runs on separate infrastructure from Azure in their own data centers.

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

#69

Post by vbezhenar »

burkaman wrote: post #16
crazygringo wrote: post #6

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…

It would certainly look bad, and I think it would potentially be illegal in some states. https://consumer.findlaw.com/consumer-transactions/price-gou... For example, Georgia: > Selling items or services determined by the Governor during a declared state of emergency to be necessary for public safety at a higher cost than they were immediately prior to the declaration. Kansas: > For any supplier of a "necessary proper…

Does this regulation applies to the entire supply chain? Otherwise it might become unreasonable to produce some goods at all if component cost raises too much.

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

#70

Post by freeone3000 »

dfee wrote: post #57
burkaman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would certainly look bad, and I think it would potentially be illegal in some states. https://consumer.findlaw.com/consumer-transactions/price-gou... For example, Georgia: > Selling items or services determined by the Governor during a declared state of emergency to be necessary for public safety at a higher cost than they were immediately prior to the declaration. Kansas: > For any supplier of a "necessary proper…

I don’t know how I feel about this. In the general case, I feel like price gouging during emergencies is unethical. But, when there is a non-artificial supply and demand issue, I struggle with the derivative effects of these policies. My concern is that rather than simply evaluating on the consumers ability to pay (and backwards-looking at prior statements instead of increased go-forward costs), these policies add on…

Governments will also exert this force on behalf of their citizens, is the happier read. In a disaster, everything becomes finite, but profiteering is still deeply disruptive to the shared societal fabric.
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