31–40 of 179 posts
It's also worth pointing out that our $60k offer for YC companies is still around, if you're in one of the older batches.
This reminds me of the old joke: Nietzsche: God is dead. God (couple of years later): Nietzsche is dead. pg: Microsoft is dead. http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html Microsoft (couple of years later): Here's some gift* for your startups. :) (*: please don't start explaining that it is not a gift, etc. -- I know. :) )
- Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook.
- Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.
I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it.
I can't help but think that Microsoft has had quite a few acquisitions as of late, though. Minecraft (gaming), Acompli (mobile email), Sunrise (mobile calendar), and probably others.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft uses this to push their PaaS offerings. All too often people jump into cloud services with IaaS whereas the Azure Websites offering will provide a lower cost for run while allowing easier scale out, management, and tie-ins with other Azure services like Azure Storage (various types), HDInsight (Hadoop), and Azure Machine Learning.
How do you figure that? Pricing on cloud services can be tough to compare so I really question anyone who presents blanket statements like that.
Microsoft is also giving YC startups three years of Office 365, access to Microsoft developer staff, and one year of free CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services. Free Office365 and CloudFlare are probably the best part of this announcement, since they are "easily migrate-able" by most startups. Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive. Even though they are negligible (in terms of money and value) th…
WOW that is a lot of credit. How does Azure stack up "in the real world" compared to Amazon, Rackspace, Google?
Uptime for 2014 compared here: http://www.networkworld.com/article/2866950/cloud-computing/... Azure had 39.77 hours of downtime, whilst Rack space had 7.52 and the winner (of the selected cloud providers was AWS with 2.41 hours. I'm not sure how those figures were calculated though. These cloud providers are multifaceted. I'm not sure which parts if each's services were analysed. Also, it is worth considering that o…
Factors for downtime were an update bug in November and weather. The bug is very unlikely to happen again. Outages due to weather really don't tell you much at all other than that they were unlucky. Overall, I would say the downtime numbers are not very useful.
http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240238379/Microsoft-Azur...
In the BizSpark Plus days, your company would receive $60K of hosting but could only use it to pay 100% of your bill in the first year of BS+. In the second year, you could use it to pay 50% and then in the third year you were paying full price for Azure. It was a pretty good deal, but if you are already spending $30-60K (or $250-$500 K) on infra in your first year or two, you're in a select breed of companies.
This seems like a Catch-22. If a startup is successful enough to get into YC, wouldn't they have a stable tech infrastructure already? This would only benefit YC startups who already use Azure. (Unless the switching cost from AWS/Rackspace/Google is low enough nowadays.)
And for those that have a proof-of-concept running on some other provider(s) (AWS/Rackspace/Google), it would be a huge boon to be able to migrate and scale using Azure and the $500k credit.
Microsoft has been really trying to entice devs for the last few years. My experience with their cloud service has been terrible, although I haven't used it in a couple of years. It was seriously bad then, and some of their recent missteps haven't done much to change my mind. But MS is definitely trying, so I wonder if Google or AWS will respond to this latest move.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft uses this to push their PaaS offerings. All too often people jump into cloud services with IaaS whereas the Azure Websites offering will provide a lower cost for run while allowing easier scale out, management, and tie-ins with other Azure services like Azure Storage (various types), HDInsight (Hadoop), and Azure Machine Learning.
"the Azure Websites offering will provide a lower cost for run while allowing easier scale out, management, and tie-ins with other Azure services" How do you figure that? Pricing on cloud services can be tough to compare so I really question anyone who presents blanket statements like that.
At the very least it will be interesting to see if more people adopt the Azure Websites PaaS offering. I know that right now most people dip their toes into Azure with IaaS because its historically more comfortable for them.