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Microsoft: Cloud services demand up, prioritization rules in place

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

#221

Post by lenkite »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #205
wtallis wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The hoarders benefit massively from hoarding. They benefit from a regulation that prevents the markets from responding to shortages and spikes in demand. They have no problem whatsoever deciding how to allocate their resources in that situation, which is the entire problem, because the market doesn’t force them to. An individual will always, every single time, without fail, know what they need better than a 3rd party…

"An individual will always, every single time, without fail, know what they need better than a 3rd party who nominates themselves to make decisions on behalf of others"

This is completely false. Most individuals in a panic buying situation never know what they really need compared to a calm, educated and knowledgeable 3rd party. This crisis has also proved your assertion wrong - witness the mass buying of perishable foods and toilet paper.

Food that was thrown out in a weeks time into garbage and food that was denied to others because of panic buyers.

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

#222

Post by fragmede »

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…

That presumes the outdated notion of perfectly rational consumers. Economists have discovered that consumers aren't rational anyway, but in the case of a pandemic the likes of which western consumers have never seen, I can assure you that consumers are anxious. Some consumers are even panic buying, and their purchasing habits are consequently even more irrational than usual. Even assuming you and I both manage to stay rational, other customers hoarding will affect our respective purchasing powers. (Tbh I'm not immune to group psychology which means panic buying.)

When a hoarder has a 5 years stockpile of TP and others have none, that's obviously inefficiently allocated in a time of need. Given that we've seen that the is market unable to handle panic buying and hoarding in (perceived) emergencies, strict allocation of certain necessities during an emergency really does seem like the easiest way to equitably handle the situation. More creative solutions may exist, like volume purchase surcharges, as seen in a Danish store [1], but by and large, "limit 1 per customer" seems entirely reasonable. (For whatever value of 1 is appropriate for a particular product.)

[1] https://nypost.com/2020/03/21/danish-store-instills-pricing-...

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

#223

Post by AA-BA-94-2A-56 »

thecatspaw wrote: post #219
bane wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The best was IRC and mumble. It's been downhill since then.

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

#224

Post by salex89 »

discordance wrote: post #159
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…

Are your VMs failing on deployment or after they are deployed? If it’s after deployment that would be concerning

Mostly on deployment (after the process has actually started), but sometimes after (on start).

Since we use Azure a lot through the API, there is a difference in the first case. Usually it would fail on the first API call, it would just tell you this or that went wrong. Now the process fails after it has been started.

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

#225

Post by traskjd »

ma2rten wrote: post #73
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?

My theory is that Amazon and Google are more prepared to handle surges because they run some of the largest web properties. This like every day is Black Friday for Amazon. It's rough, but not something they have never dealt with before.

"This like every day is Black Friday for Amazon."

So, a pretty big deal then: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17577654/amazon-prime-day...

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

#226

Post by AmericanChopper »

fragmede wrote: post #222
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…

That presumes the outdated notion of perfectly rational consumers. Economists have discovered that consumers aren't rational anyway, but in the case of a pandemic the likes of which western consumers have never seen, I can assure you that consumers are anxious. Some consumers are even panic buying, and their purchasing habits are consequently even more irrational than usual. Even assuming you and I both manage to sta…

But you’re not describing an irrational actor. If the entire global economy collapsed (which is not an irrational fear to have), then having several months supply of non-perishable food, cleaning and hygiene supplies would be very valuable thing. What makes that either rational or irrational is the expense you went to purchase them. If prices are not allowed to rise to equilibrium, then that expense is going to be very minimal.

As I’ve said several times. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ration certain staples, and essential services. Everything else should just be priced to supply and demand. It’s not reasonable to call something price gouging if there are actually shortages.

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

#227

Post by yread »

Simon_says wrote: post #210
raghavtoshniwal wrote: post #29

It would be interesting to know how many standard deviations is 775% extra demand from the norm. More than six standard deviations is rarer than a 1 in 506797346 event.

Samples getting 6 standard deviations away from the mean can happen 1/6² ≈ 2.7% of the time. You might be assuming properties of the distribution that aren't true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev%27s_inequality

Isn't that an upper bound? It says that it happens at most 2.7% of the time

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

#228

Post by turbinerneiter »

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.

RIP slack, you tried, but 0 chance against MS/win/office monopoly.

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

#229

Post by AmericanChopper »

lenkite wrote: post #221
AmericanChopper wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hoarders benefit massively from hoarding. They benefit from a regulation that prevents the markets from responding to shortages and spikes in demand. They have no problem whatsoever deciding how to allocate their resources in that situation, which is the entire problem, because the market doesn’t force them to. An individual will always, every single time, without fail, know what they need better than a 3rd party…

"An individual will always, every single time, without fail, know what they need better than a 3rd party who nominates themselves to make decisions on behalf of others" This is completely false. Most individuals in a panic buying situation never know what they really need compared to a calm, educated and knowledgeable 3rd party. This crisis has also proved your assertion wrong - witness the mass buying of perishable…

> This crisis has also proved your assertion wrong - witness the mass buying of perishable foods and toilet paper.

It hasn’t at all. For starters, non-perishable food was absolutely the first to vanish off the shelves. But that aside, buying too much has no detriment at all to the purchaser. The risk that they may not consume all of it is so incredibly minimal compared to what they’re actually worried about. This is only possible because prices are artificially constrained. Most people don’t have to face a considerable opportunity cost when buy way more food than they need.

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

#230

Post by onefuncman »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #71
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utilization.

Their utilization has gone up 700%? Bullshit.

Uh, it's absolutely true. I have entire offices (100s of people) that switched from Webex to MS Teams for better video quality.
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