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

theverge.com

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

#121

Post by mushufasa »

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…

Externally managed cloud provisioning can be a win from a SOC2 / ISO compliance perspective. You've just changed from having to manage controls on local environments yourself (e.g. antivirus, MDM, logging etc ) to offloading the risk to a third-party vendor. Now, you may think that is more INSECURE because now someone else has control over your environments, and that may be true for any arbitrary cloud desktop provider. But when it is Microsoft themselves, it will be hard for an auditor to take issue; they already manage the risk of the OS security itself.

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

#122

Post by Anunayj »

octopoc wrote: post #89
orev wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could use VirtualBox for free.

VirtualBox on the Mac is extremely slow. Also Parallels has much better integration with the Mac host (automatic shared folders, syncing program shortcuts between the host and the guest, etc.).

How does Parallels work? Why is it faster?

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

#123

Post by nix23 »

dotcommand wrote: post #80

"significant demand", "sold out", etc. Considering this is microsoft and theverge, this "news" story is just paid PR/ad like so much of these type of stories are.

One could see i that way, i would see it as:

Microsoft has still problems with scaling ;)

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

#124

Post by ace2358 »

octopoc wrote: post #89
orev wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could use VirtualBox for free.

VirtualBox on the Mac is extremely slow. Also Parallels has much better integration with the Mac host (automatic shared folders, syncing program shortcuts between the host and the guest, etc.).

Can confirm that it’s slow. I tried so many different things, different GFX cards while trying to run Windows (xp, 7, 10) on my Mac Pro (2012, 2 x 6 core 3.4ghz, 128gb ram).

The only one that runs well in virtual box was XP. Everything else had extremely slow disk accès, graphics performance and cpu. It took like an hour to boot windows 10.

Parallels was what I would consider native speed with better features. That was really disappointing as I wanted to use OSS.

Running links in Vbox seems fine though and I run a few vms 24/7.

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

#125

Post by mike3498234 »

mnkypete wrote: post #20
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…

You have an 8core laptop with 32gig RAM for $700? That's not super common though, I think usually you'd spend more like $2500-$3000k for it. Count in the reduced maintenance and hardware support + having your whole stuff in one place.. Might make sense if you are not super low on money

That Azure VM only has 4 cores, not 8 cores. 1 vCPU = 1 hyper-thread (not a physical core). 4 cores * 2 threads = 8 vCPU. Yes it's easy to get a used quad core laptop with 32G for $700

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

#126

Post by sofixa »

Animats wrote: post #18
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…

Who the heck is buying these VMs that cost 5x real hardware? Right. This has already been tried in the "game streaming" business. There have been multiple services where you rent a PC in "the cloud" by the hour, or for some number of hours per month. Either they cost too much, and fail for lack of customers, or they are underpriced as a loss leader, and get shut down after losing money. Google Stadia and NVidia Cloud…

> NVidia's offering involves being kicked off if you stay connected too long.

8 hours, which is a pretty decent gaming session. You can reconnect just afterwards anyways.

> but Stadia is likely to join Google's list of discontinued products

Highly unlikely, they're spending tens of millions to get EA and Ubisoft's catalogues on Stadia.

In any case, cloud gaming works, sells, and is very useful for some subset of users, even more so with the ongoing global chip shortage. I have both Geforce Now and Stadia and I'm very happy with them. Playing on my laptop and TV ( with a Chromecast) is great. Playing from my phone in a hotel room is a fun experience. Stadia even makes financial sense, because there's a free version ( at 1080p/30fps), you only need to buy the games ( which you would anyways regardless of the platform), saving you hundreds of (insert currency) in the process. The paid one is 10 eur/usd/month for better quality and some free games. And if you're the type of person that wants 4K 120Hz 60fps, this isn't for you and isn't the point.

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

#128

Post by samlevine »

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…

> You still need a physical machine to access "the cloud", so don't you still have all the expensive problems related to managing a fleet of PCs, but now you have to do it x2?

Microsoft Intune/Endpoint manager is actually pretty easy to setup/enroll laptops. Autopilot takes a bit of work, but it does get you to the point where IT doesn't have to do anything on a new laptop shipped to a user.

Ultimately if you don't want your users doing much on their laptops you can make it pretty simple to manage them.

> Is data security so important that some companies are willing to pay 5x hardware costs and 2x maintenance costs for it?

It really depends on the industry. Most folks aren't doing this because security isn't a priority.

Some firms may not survive a data breach, others might incur tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in costs (directly and indirectly) for one large breach. These folks do care and will spend whatever it takes because it's got a business justification.

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

#129

Post by znpy »

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?

For the same reasons people pay for the was clouf offerings or the Google cloud equivalent.

Less hassle, less stuff to manage, faster provisioning, hassle-free decommissioning.

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

#130

Post by hogFeast »

Closi wrote: post #116
hogFeast wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't. Some of the companies that do the latter are also doing the former.

You are talking about Microsoft and Google - two of the largest computing companies on the planet. By the same logic, you could say that game streaming is like a search engine, because some of the companies that do the latter are also doing the former. The idea of provisioning remote cloud VMs is far older than Stadia or Xbox Cloud anyway.

I am not talking Microsoft or Google. There are lots of smaller companies that provide this service.

Your point about game streaming being like a search engine is nonsensical.

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