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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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

What mechanism do you plan to use to determine the severity of a need?

I've laid out a basic structure for my stance already so let me turn the question back to you: Do you feel that traditional market forces, with hoarding, panic buying, and price gouging at the same time health care providers run out of PPE, ventilators and other equipment... Do you feel the market forces are working in a way that best serves resolving this crisis and helping those in medical peril?

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

#162
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an entire Costco package of toilet paper that will last me months while some poor bastard near me is probably wiping his ass with his hand (or worse, flushing paper towel and causing thousands of dollars of damage) because there is no effective way for me to resell my excess in a way that is legal and won’t result in crazy social media backlash against me. I similarly have months of supply of hand sanitizer (o…

Wouldn't you be within the law if you simply sold the rolls at your own cost, or even your cost plus 10%, rather than trying to turn a large profit from them?

I might be within the law (although in some places like BC all reselling is straight up illegal) but some busybody would still call the cops on me and online listings would be taken down by the likes of amazon or ebay.

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

#163

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…

Apparently Team usage is up significantly. You can do video conferencing via Team which is one aspect that is quite different from Slack. I imagine there are some new use cases arising from that.

We recently dropped slack and moved to teams when we started working from home. It seems to be mostly better than slack.

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

#164
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Integration seems like the ideal path for Slack. Make it easy and seamless to use any third party service from Slack rather than trying to build functionality directly into it other than the core group/direct chat stuff.

How is video conferencing not a core chat thing?

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

#166

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.

Disney+ runs on AWS

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

#167
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something something mythical man-month.

I have an entire Costco package of toilet paper that will last me months while some poor bastard near me is probably wiping his ass with his hand (or worse, flushing paper towel and causing thousands of dollars of damage) because there is no effective way for me to resell my excess in a way that is legal and won’t result in crazy social media backlash against me. I similarly have months of supply of hand sanitizer (o…

As long as you have soap, you can wash your hands afterwards. Not my preferred method, but there's quite some cultures where they do it this way.

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

#168
post #57

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…

Almost all emergency-related profiteering is about non-artificial supply and demand issues. Grocery chains charging 10x as much for water or toilet paper is exactly the kind of thing these laws are meant to prevent.

(If the shortage is long-term, you'll usually want to implement a rationing system to address the shortages, but in the short term this kind of fiat can work.)

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

#169

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…

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.

Yes.

Same with the exceptions to shelter-in-place for the suppliers of essential service providers.

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

#170

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.…

I don't get how they are profiteering out of this. The prices haven't changed from before the pandemic.

What's happening now is unprecedented. Without public cloud providers, most businesses would not be able to run this giant work-from-home experiment. If they were hosted on-prem then they couldn't scale either.

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