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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

#111

Post by perl4ever »

lend000 wrote: post #95
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 wonder how many masks would be floating around by now if there were no laws or public shaming for raising prices in an emergency.

Something something mythical man-month.

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

#112

Post by loeg »

eightysixfour wrote: post #28
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…

Don’t forget Xbox Live on Azure, it has had a pair of outages in the last few weeks as well.

Latency in multiplayer games (at least Halo:CE prints well-known Azure region names during game load) has been noticeably worse in the past few weeks, IME. Even during off-peak hours.

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

#113

Post by loeg »

enlyth wrote: post #93
spencerwgreene wrote: post #68

The Microsoft blog post that the article is using as a source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/update-2-on-microsoft... .

After reading this, it seems the headline is a bit misleading. The Microsoft blog post states: "We have seen a 775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders." So it's not an overall increase, just in certain regions?

A lot of the value of hyperscaler clouds is the lowish latency local datacenters.

Also, everywhere's going to have enforced S.D. or S.I.P. sooner or later.

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

#114

Post by AmericanChopper »

burkaman wrote: post #87
AmericanChopper wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ability to pay is only one aspect of demand. There’s also how much you actually want it, and the amount of opportunity cost you’re willing to pay. Keeping prices artificially low keeps demand artificially high, while supply doesn’t increase, or cannot increase if it’s inelastic.

> There’s also how much you actually want it, and the amount of opportunity cost you’re willing to pay. Money doesn't have much relation to opportunity cost in the presence of enormous wealth inequality. An unemployed person willing to pay their entire bank account of $100 for some good clearly wants it more than a work-from-home tech worker willing to pay the $600 they made yesterday. The same applies to businesses…

I’d consider providing essential services to low income people disadvantaged during a crisis to be a seperate issue all together. I’d also suggest that such an issue would only apply to a narrow band of essential products and services. An unemployed person with $100 in their account isn’t going to care about how much access they have to high quality video conferencing. However, if I have the option of using a 12 person video conference for my morning standup, why wouldn’t I use it? If there was an additional cost for every video conference I wanted to have, I’d think more judiciously about when to use it. Which sounds better than the current situation of knowing that video conferencing is simply going to be unreliable and slow, regardless of how much I may need it for any particular meeting.

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

#115

Post by lalaland1125 »

loeg wrote: post #106
cosmodisk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are making bread and suddenly price of flour increases by 600%,so you have to increase your prices. Unless you are based in a country run by some delusional autocrat, you'd be fine. If, however,the supply chain is fine, i.e. your toilet paper supplier, however you end up selling it for 500% price because people can't seen to have enough of it- the the laws would apply.

Unfortunately these "delusional autocrats" run the government of, for example, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, etc. and would absolutely punish such a baker.

I highly recommend that you read through the legislation. The legislation explicitly allows prices to increase due to actual increases in costs. The only thing that's banned is increases in price due to increased profit margins.

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

#116

Post by ineedasername »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #85
dfee wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ability to pay is only one aspect of demand. There’s also how much you actually want it, and the amount of opportunity cost you’re willing to pay. Keeping prices artificially low keeps demand artificially high, while supply doesn’t increase, or cannot increase if it’s inelastic.

It doesn't matter if demand is artifial if there's a filter in place to allocate resources on a need-basis. Not matter the demand from non-need customers, they won't get it, or get less of it. The point in a crisis isn't to let markets find a natural equilibrium, which could mean it stabilizes into a state that isn't optimal to public health. On a crisis, the point is to prioritize those usages that will deal with and help lessen the crisis.

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

#117

Post by lonelappde »

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…

That still leaves a 24% gap.

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

#118

Post by loeg »

burkaman wrote: post #87
AmericanChopper wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ability to pay is only one aspect of demand. There’s also how much you actually want it, and the amount of opportunity cost you’re willing to pay. Keeping prices artificially low keeps demand artificially high, while supply doesn’t increase, or cannot increase if it’s inelastic.

> There’s also how much you actually want it, and the amount of opportunity cost you’re willing to pay. Money doesn't have much relation to opportunity cost in the presence of enormous wealth inequality. An unemployed person willing to pay their entire bank account of $100 for some good clearly wants it more than a work-from-home tech worker willing to pay the $600 they made yesterday. The same applies to businesses…

You've just described how a monetary system works and have not refuted the link between prices and opportunity cost.

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

#119

Post by lonelappde »

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…

Proof of work isn't necessary. Rationing works too.

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

#120

Post by [deleted] »

bobthepanda wrote: post #26
stefan_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think 1) locking in customers via proprietary APIs 2) limiting supply of resources 3) auctioning off to the highest bidder among your locked in customers was entirely the core feature of clouds. Rather, the idea was "we'll charge so much margin you never need to worry about anything physical, another machine is just an API call away". You don't need to overprovision for peak times and there is less physical s…

To be fair, a situation where every single company in the world needed to ramp up on the cloud at the same time is completely unprecedented, and spending the money to do it would've been considered a fools' errand. If people weren't on the cloud, you'd see them scrambling for physical hardware, which also isn't exactly easy to come by on extremely short notice when the world's logistic chains are under stress as well…

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