Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by chipotle_coyote » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 5:41 AM UTC

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…

(1) That is not the definition of "opportunity cost" that economists commonly use.

(2) As I often see when people make the case you're making, you are making unwarranted assumptions about the rationality of buyers. If people are fleeing a hurricane and the gas station raises the price sharply because of the demand, what can happen (and we've seen it happen, in fact) is that it encourages hoarding: it is now a precious commodity and those who can afford to buy it do so, denying it to others.

(3) As I also often see when people make the case you're making, you're also inserting a Big Bad Government Guy into the scenario, your "rationing authority," which people making my case aren't necessarily suggesting at all: we're suggesting that it is rational for suppliers to choose to ration goods in order to be able to meet the demand of a greater number of customers, rather than to meet only the demand of shoppers who can buy as much of [thing in short supply] as possible. Again this is what we actually see in practice, at this very moment: stores in my local area limiting the number of certain items you're able to buy at one time are not doing so because they have been ordered by the California Politburo to do so, they are doing so because on balance they can serve a greater number of customers, rather than turning away literally thousands of desperate people who couldn't "allocate their resources" as well as the guy with five Ultra Transparent Titanium Master Cards.

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

#212

Post by dumbfoundded » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 5:54 AM UTC

noitsnot wrote: post #104

dumbfoundded wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's safe to say the market isn't rational when Zoom Technologies is up nearly 900% when it's completely unrelated to Zoom Video and not actually operating. There's a different HN post about it: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-sec-really-wants-investo...

I don't think you can really compare people accidentally buying the wrong ticker to investors unable to place valuations based on virus uncertainties. They were buying the wrong stock before the virus hit more than a year ago.

The wrong stock increased faster than the real stock. Volume matters too but when the underlying causes are irrational, how can any pricing be logical over any period longer than a few days?

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

#213

Post by BoorishBears » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 5:55 AM UTC

aianus wrote: post #187

perl4ever wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't seem to be responding to my comment. High prices cannot necessarily increase supply when the timeframe is strictly limited. This is a reality that a lot of people seem to not accept. So the effect of price is just to determine the distribution of a limited supply. That significantly reduces the utility of a market pricing system. Directing production is a fundamental reason why markets are useful in normal…

High prices encourage people like me who have more than enough to get off their asses and share the excess. There is already plenty of TP in existence in the country for everyone, it’s just poorly distributed because the gov has removed the incentive for the TP-haves to distribute it better towards the TP-have-nots. Or, more to the point of the article, there is no incentive for someone with a useless side project to…

> High prices encourage people like me who have more than enough to get off their asses and share the excess.

> the gov has removed the incentive for the TP-haves to distribute it better towards the TP-have-nots.

Really?

> 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...

This is not a reason to you? Some people might not appreciate the tone of this but, you’re seriously lacking morals if it’s not.

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

#214

Post by AmericanChopper » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:01 AM UTC

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #211

AmericanChopper wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(1) That is not the definition of "opportunity cost" that economists commonly use. (2) As I often see when people make the case you're making, you are making unwarranted assumptions about the rationality of buyers. If people are fleeing a hurricane and the gas station raises the price sharply because of the demand, what can happen (and we've seen it happen, in fact) is that it encourages hoarding: it is now a preciou…

(1) that is the precise definition of opportunity cost. It is everything you forgo the opportunity to do whenever you choose to do anything. Whether you are choosing how to spend your money, or spend your time, or devote your attention, or expend your energy. All of those are opportunity cost decision. It also includes everything you forgo for any given decision. If you choose to buy a Ford, perhaps the opportunity cost could be that you don’t buy a Chrysler. But it could also be that you don’t eat out as often, because you have to make car payments, or that you don’t buy a PlayStation. It is all of those things. This is the definition used in the field of economics.

(2) raising prices will always reduce demand, outside of the very specific circumstances where demand is inelastic. Supply and demand is an inescapable law of economics, and subverting it will always result in failures in the supply chain. The scenario you described will also not increase hoarding, it will most certainly decrease it (whether arbitrage trading crops up is a different issue, but one that is completely unrelated to hoarding).

(3) I used the term rationing authority because it was a neutral descriptor. Anybody who acts as an authority on allocation rations is going to be creating the same inefficiencies (though you’d expect the parts of the supply chain closest to the consumers to be the least inefficient)

Most of what you’ve said has demonstrated serious misunderstandings of how the basic principles like supply and demand and opportunity cost works. Your argument that raising prices increases demand should really just be dismissed off the bat.

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

#215

Post by kekskeks » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:09 AM UTC

what_ever wrote: post #208

leesalminen wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GSuite and GCP had impactful outages for us this past week and were listed on the status dashboards.

Looks like you are repeating the same comment everywhere without linking at what kind of outages GCP had. Disc: Googler

https://www.ciodive.com/news/google-cloud-platform-outage/57...

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

#216

Post by psandersen » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:12 AM UTC

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…

Ignoring the implementation issues, my issue is when the vendor profits of limited supply in a crisis.

If the supplier is only passing on their own increased costs then that's at least fair in principle. Similarly, marginal increases in price for marginal increases in use also seems fair when there are demand surges.

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

#217

Post by wutwutwutwut » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:24 AM UTC

bowmessage wrote: post #194

ineedasername wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For toy projects, sure.

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

#218

Post by evbpcapfxy » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:40 AM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #177

aianus wrote: 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…

You don't seem to be responding to my comment. High prices cannot necessarily increase supply when the timeframe is strictly limited. This is a reality that a lot of people seem to not accept. So the effect of price is just to determine the distribution of a limited supply. That significantly reduces the utility of a market pricing system. Directing production is a fundamental reason why markets are useful in normal…

That stock in unaffected areas is allocated to the affected crisis area seems like an incredible benefit though. Seems to me that this is an example illustrates the opposite actually. Human demand might be infinite but supply is always limited

Also, high prices sends information to producers that riskily ramping up or shifting production can be worth it. Might not be worth it at a lower price point.

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

#219

Post by thecatspaw » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 7:15 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #192

yurlungur wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jo…

I still absolutely loathe teams. There is no way to get it to show you have unread messages (the red dot of slack). Notifications do not work reliably. When I am in a Teams channel I miss notifications from the Chat channels, and vice versa.

For me Teams has been a major downgrade from Slack

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

#220

Post by Cthulhu_ » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 7:36 AM UTC

pyuser583 wrote: post #142

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…

I wonder what the net neutrality people think?

Net neutrality is about the network itself, the internet, not cloud computing.