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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’

#141

Post by rootusrootus »

iso1210 wrote: post #13
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…

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.

At my last shop, we had similar problems. We got around it by including extra equipment we wanted in our server orders. Accounting never bothered asking why we needed nice keyboards and big monitors for rackmount servers. But god forbid you try to buy those directly. At one point management started to get wise, so we just had the vendor include the extra equipment in the same line item as the servers instead of broken out, just increasing the per-server cost to account for it.

Shenanigans like that shouldn't be necessary just to get the stuff you need, but big corporations are so dysfunctional sometimes.

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

#143

Post by morpheuskafka »

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…

And as far as security goes, the now unmanaged BYOD client can still have keyloggers or screen recording malware that can extract company data. If your users can't be trusted with any sort of onboarding/MDM enrollment, it would still be cheaper to just send them a working laptop. If you don't want to do VPNs, you could still do Zero Trust style applications and have a cloud MDM for management.

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

#144

Post by sbierwagen »

sofixa wrote: post #126
Animats wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 user…

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

Loon also cost tens of millions, made no sense, and was eventually canceled.

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

#145

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#146

Post by spicyusername »

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 consulted for large banks whose onboarding time was 2-3 MONTHS! Just to get a laptop and VPN credentials.

The rampant dysfunction in large organizations never ceases to amaze me.

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

#147

Post by 908B64B197 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #141
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.

At my last shop, we had similar problems. We got around it by including extra equipment we wanted in our server orders. Accounting never bothered asking why we needed nice keyboards and big monitors for rackmount servers. But god forbid you try to buy those directly. At one point management started to get wise, so we just had the vendor include the extra equipment in the same line item as the servers instead of broke…

Just expense them on the corporate card. They should have a budget for office stuff anyways.

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

#148

Post by Macha »

908B64B197 wrote: post #147
rootusrootus wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my last shop, we had similar problems. We got around it by including extra equipment we wanted in our server orders. Accounting never bothered asking why we needed nice keyboards and big monitors for rackmount servers. But god forbid you try to buy those directly. At one point management started to get wise, so we just had the vendor include the extra equipment in the same line item as the servers instead of broke…

Just expense them on the corporate card. They should have a budget for office stuff anyways.

Do accounting not get a record of everything you purchase on the corporate card and require an explanation (or else repayment)?

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

#149

Post by Macha »

notthedroids wrote: post #109
CountDrewku wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really need to pay to license windows if you're just using it for testing.

Because Microsoft permits testing without a license? Or because you believe, in practice, Microsoft will not assert its intellectual property rights against someone who is only testing? (I am personally OK with the first, not the second.)

> Because Microsoft permits testing without a license

Yes

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virt...

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...

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

#150

Post by 908B64B197 »

Macha wrote: post #148
908B64B197 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just expense them on the corporate card. They should have a budget for office stuff anyways.

Do accounting not get a record of everything you purchase on the corporate card and require an explanation (or else repayment)?

Yeah. Keyboards, headphones, mice, monitors, desk chairs purchased for software engineers... Pretty self explanatory.
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