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Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

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Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#91

Post by api »

donmcronald wrote: post #10

> including one at the top end that includes eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? I know it's for businesses, but even then, does it come with tooling or something that makes management eas…

Nearly all irrational pricing like this can be explained by corporate bureaucracy and dysfunction.

If you need to provision someone you can buy them a laptop, but that's CapEx and has to go through some equipment purchasing bureaucracy that's hell on wheels to deal with.

Cloud services are OpEx though and might be something you as an IT person or department head can just approve as long as the monthly cost is low enough. The cumulative cost difference over many months or years doesn't factor into it.

A whole lot of the cloud trend can be explained this way.

Of course other use cases include temporary employees, testing, external contractors, etc.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#92

Post by exhilaration »

formerly_proven wrote: post #35
cptskippy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you use a lot of contractor developers, being able to provision out devices for temporary work is powerful. A lot of time is spent provisioning machines, white listing ips, setting up VPNs, and getting the contractor to the point where they can work. In some cases I've seen it take 2 or 3 weeks to get a contractor up and running on a 6 month contract. Being able to give them credentials to a machine that's ready…

Okay, now I'm just laughing out loud. My org has an internal/external reputation for not exactly being fast moving and having convoluted IT processes, yet we can onboard people within a few days. If it takes you 2-3 weeks to onboard ANYONE please realize that your IT processes are complete, unmitigated garbage. Paying Microsoft for some Windows VMs through the nose isn't going to change anything about that.

I've got a friend who got a contracting position at the US Dept of Veterans Affairs and he said they hadn't given him the right access after 2+ months into a 6-month contract.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#93

Post by NullPrefix »

mistrial9 wrote: post #55
iso1210 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a large corporation. I can spend 50k a month in AWS and it will barely register a flag. Try to buy a keyboard though and forget it.

I purchased a large desktop monitor and had it shipped to my contract company address delivery dock -- wow, you should have seen the number of alarmed accountant types I had to talk to .. but six-figure Ora licenses ? many in operation

Did you print out the invoice to show for dramatic effect?

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#94

Post by NullPrefix »

mdoms wrote: post #78
908B64B197 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? CapEx vs OpEx. Also, your iPad is now a Windows machine with eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month.

> Also, your iPad is now a Windows machine Until Apple decides they're not comfortable with that and bans it.

There are HTML5 VNC clients. Although I'm not sure if they work on Ipads

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#95

Post by dmhmr »

formerly_proven wrote: post #35
cptskippy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you use a lot of contractor developers, being able to provision out devices for temporary work is powerful. A lot of time is spent provisioning machines, white listing ips, setting up VPNs, and getting the contractor to the point where they can work. In some cases I've seen it take 2 or 3 weeks to get a contractor up and running on a 6 month contract. Being able to give them credentials to a machine that's ready…

Okay, now I'm just laughing out loud. My org has an internal/external reputation for not exactly being fast moving and having convoluted IT processes, yet we can onboard people within a few days. If it takes you 2-3 weeks to onboard ANYONE please realize that your IT processes are complete, unmitigated garbage. Paying Microsoft for some Windows VMs through the nose isn't going to change anything about that.

May I introduce you to the US Federal Government?

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#96

Post by wintermutestwin »

donmcronald wrote: post #10

> including one at the top end that includes eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? I know it's for businesses, but even then, does it come with tooling or something that makes management eas…

>Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used?

My guess is that this kind of financial inanity is being driven by accounting rules: CapX vs OpX, revenue recognition rules, etc...

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#97

Post by MattGaiser »

SCHiM wrote: post #90
MattGaiser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to policies from frustrating departments, people tend to find workarounds, especially if there is no easy way to enforce the rules. At a prior company, one of the only reasons we adopted anything SaaS was that IT didn't have to know it existed.

Ohhh man/woman. I'm a security person. I often work with my customers' central IT. I'm not going to have an opinion or judge you, but consider: You're giving people nightmares. I've seen it go very wrong (front-page news wrong). And then the threads commenting on "how incompetent can they be, blabla". I've worked with the people stressed, sad and disappointed that they got pwned because of shadow IT. It's a ticking t…

I'm too junior to make decisions, but a lot of it basically came down to the organizations I have worked with all either being government or running things on quarters.

In the former case there was high turnover (replace the team in 1.5 years) and in the latter cases there was high turnover coupled with a problem more than a month away not being considered a problem. So in the former knowledge poured out the door and in the latter knowledge poured out the door and nobody had an interest in anything beyond the quarter, so you do what gets you to the next review cycle.

Basically in both cases the bomb does not matter as you either probably won't be there when it goes off or it doesn't matter as you miss your quarterly goal instead.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#99

Post by samspenc »

Someone1234 wrote: post #15
mongol wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seems quite expensive?

Looks like they tried to match Amazon Workspaces prices. That doesn't mean it isn't expensive though. I'd call them both niche products that I'd be more interested in developing on if it wasn't so expensive to do so (at 16 GB of RAM). I'm not entirely sure I can describe what the normal deployment scenario looks like (e.g. traveling salesman doesn't work because you'd need too high of internet quality on the road, de…

I was going to say that if they priced it per minute or hour, like some other IaaS offerings, this would have been competitive. I can imagine a developer or occasional user using this for 1-5 hours a day, and then putting it to sleep...

But nope, just checked, it's a flat rate per month, irrespective of use, so definitely looks cheaper to just buy a high-end machine and install Windows on it (or Mac + Parallels + Windows like others have noted.)

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#100

Post by CountDrewku »

cptskippy wrote: post #22
donmcronald wrote: post #10

> including one at the top end that includes eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? I know it's for businesses, but even then, does it come with tooling or something that makes management eas…

When you use a lot of contractor developers, being able to provision out devices for temporary work is powerful. A lot of time is spent provisioning machines, white listing ips, setting up VPNs, and getting the contractor to the point where they can work. In some cases I've seen it take 2 or 3 weeks to get a contractor up and running on a 6 month contract. Being able to give them credentials to a machine that's ready…

That doesn't hold up. Unless your org is completely inept at device setup they should be able to do the same with a physical PC as well. You don't gain much from provisioning a completely virtual device.
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