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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

#191

Post by fencepost »

toyg wrote: post #176
p1necone wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Integration seems like the ideal path for Slack. It's pretty easy for Teams too. I don't particularly like Teams, nor do I like Slack, but there is nothing feature-wise, today, that would make me choose Slack over Teams. Teams also plays much better with OneDrive and Outlook, obviously. I think Slack is now a goner. They will be acquired in 5 years tops.

Perhaps they can be the Google chat product that survives?

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

#192

Post by bane »

yurlungur wrote: post #24
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…

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 had started tentatively using teams before all this. Now it's a critical part of our day-to-day functioning and you know what? It's not bad, not bad at all. It's pretty well thought out, reliable, integrated with Outlook and Sharepoint.

Even the few people who complained that they wouldn't use it because there wasn't a phone number to call for telecons were overcome when we told them to just install the app and join the conference that way.

For internal work, it's actually been a lifesaver. Webex and other solutions have failed to hold up under the strain while Teams has more or less just kept marching on.

I have a feeling as this goes on for the next few months Teams users will not go back to the fractured fragile mess of other apps we tried to get along with before hand.

Hell, there's even a halfway decent Kanban built in.

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

#193

Post by Operyl »

pwarner wrote: post #40
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…

AWS spot prices are rising last 3 weeks.

I looked at a few of the instances (20 or so) and did not see any substantial increase over the past 4 weeks. Which instances are you seeing spiking up?

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

#194

Post by bowmessage »

ineedasername wrote: post #131
enlyth wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, and they also say that if you're hitting quotas, you can try another less congested region. If you have established workloads in a region though, I'm not sure how quickly you can migrate a complex interplay of services to another region-- are there simple tools to do so in Azure?

hopefully you are writing infrastructure as code - would be easy then.

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

#195

Post by wtallis »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #173
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure "opportunity cost" is the correct term for what the OP wanted to say, since it usually refers to the (theoretical) loss incurred by choosing one alternative over another. The point is simply that a consumer's ability to pay is not necessarily a reflection of their need of the product. That's not an argument to blithely decouple pricing from supply and demand, but it's a recognition of a problem that a ma…

Opportunity cost is everything you choose to forgo when you choose to allocate any resources to anything. If supply and demand is allowed to have its normal influence on price, then you can decide what you actually have the most demand for, and allocate your resources accordingly. The decisions you make regarding your own needs are always going to be much more efficient than those that any rationing authority could e…

> The decisions you make regarding your own needs are always going to be much more efficient than those that any rationing authority could ever make.

If that were true, then hoarding wouldn't happen in the first place. You're obviously wrong here, and there's abundant evidence that consumers don't always make the best choices for themselves. Try scaling back your claims to something less absolute.

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

#196

Post by wtallis »

lend000 wrote: post #188
stainforth wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So make it $500 a mask and you just cordon off a good for the rich.

Econ 101: Today, masks are $500. Tomorrow, 100 companies in various industries begin to repurpose their factories to produce masks and arbitrage the price down until it isn't profitable anymore. Supply increases; thus, there are more masks than there were before the price increase. Even if you don't like who gets the first mask, you can't deny that supply increases, and therefore more people now have masks.

And in the next lecture, you learn that factories can't be retooled overnight, and people die in the meantime.

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

#197

Post by simplezeal »

daxfohl wrote: post #30
rightbyte wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rampant" work from home with Office 365 I guess. I guess most of the load is all these Team video calls and VPN services?

Yeah as a member of Azure networking, it's odd: HR is communicating we should do video calls for meetings instead of just audio, to keep the personal touch, and I'm wondering if that's really the best use of our bandwidth. I keep my video off anyway.

Compromise is to turn on video only when talking. Also works as #raisehand ..

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

#199

Post by lend000 »

wtallis wrote: post #196
lend000 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Econ 101: Today, masks are $500. Tomorrow, 100 companies in various industries begin to repurpose their factories to produce masks and arbitrage the price down until it isn't profitable anymore. Supply increases; thus, there are more masks than there were before the price increase. Even if you don't like who gets the first mask, you can't deny that supply increases, and therefore more people now have masks.

And in the next lecture, you learn that factories can't be retooled overnight, and people die in the meantime.

Masks are not complex. It does not need to be an N95 certified mask to significantly reduce respirated droplets. You would be surprised by the ingenuity of entrepreneurs, but of course, this thread is not about logic but instead about jealousy of others' abilities to profit in a way that some people think is unethical, despite the fact that it would undeniably result in more masks to combat this crisis. In reality, most of the people with your viewpoint cannot envision themselves scrapping together something and pivoting their entire business on such a short time frame, and they share the relatively common personality trait in which they then don't want others to succeed where they do not.

> factories can't be retooled overnight, and people die in the meantime.

Of course the masks aren't hitting shelves the next day, perhaps two weeks before meaningful production increases. What a pointless statement -- the crisis won't be over in two weeks, and this same principle would have held two weeks ago, or eight. And then you would blame people dying on the entrepreneurs retooling to create masks? Another pointless statement if that is not your intent.

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

jedieaston wrote: post #4
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?

Office 365 runs on Azure in the same regions other workloads do (There's probably some replication going on behind the scenes too, since you don't pick your instance), so I'd bet that tons of new Office 365 subscriptions in the past month are what is causing this, not people deciding to lift-and-shift their app workloads because of the virus. Teams adoption has probably shot way up too.

[deleted]
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