Spare a reserved cloud instance, gov? Microsoft's $1bn, 70k charity sales pitch Microsoft is donating $1bn worth of its cloud services over three years to charities and non profits. The software giant used the annual Davos World Economic Forum media ego fest to unveil plans to recruit 70,000 to Microsoft cloud services in the next three years. Others promoted themselves at Davos in different ways. …
...any large scale, professionally run charity able to make use of cloud, BI and CRM finds it is almost totally dependent upon Microsoft, there's probably no other comparable free services (and even if there were, switching provider is a bit IT project with a big cost that will come out of donations). Oh dear, how sad, charity donations going straight into Microsoft's coffers.
Microsoft aren't poor. They've got circa $100bn in cash and no debt. They could afford a more targeted offer to selected large charities on a much longer term basis, giving stability to the charity, and confidence that the benefits over the agreement's life will outweigh the possible exit or re-source costs. As they're not doing that, I tend to go back to the cynical interpretation, that this is a form of entrapment. Not unlike most IT outsource and BPO pitches, then.
It ain't free if it doesn't stay free, it is just an addictive dependency. So how much does M$ spend on advertising, surely by your definition giving that money to TV stations, Radio stations, magazines, web sites, why that is all free gifts and any advertising or promotion they do is purely by accident.
Basically M$ are being dick douche bags by invading everyone's privacy and they want charity organisations to sell their souls to advertise for M$, along with selling our privacy (every donor record passed straight to M$).
M$ quite simply can not in any way shape of form be trusted and as such any organisations that crawl in bed with M$ are going to have to expect their reputations to be used and abused by M$, see all those organisations trust M$, so you should just bend over and take the probe.
Image the EFF https://www.eff.org/ taking that not so free money, all they have to do is sell out our privacy. Those charities are paying a price, paying with their reputation and our privacy, is that a price worth paying?
I work for an NFP, one of the biggest in Australia,to be honest, and as of this morning we purchased 25 CRM online user licenses for $555 a month. This combined with Azure and Office 365 is going to cost us a bit. While we did get the NFP pricing, if I had have known about this little bit of information I would have been searching for it. As it were, none of the Microsoft representatives even bothered with the fact that their company is giving the stuff away for free...
So, long story short, does anyone have a link where I can sign up for the freebies?
Microsoft as a corporation has been at the top or near the top of every corporation in the United States for the last 20 years in philanthropic giving and not all of it has been "get you hooked on MS freebies." Then if you take the matching donations to all of their employees and add in the philanthropic activities of former Microsoft folks, especially those from the early decades of the company it's a pretty significant figure.
And just for the heck of it....throw in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
You haters can continue hating if it makes you feel good. Maybe you should, instead, do something positive for a change.
"CEO Satya Nadella, in the Swiss land of power powder, reckoned cloud to be “the most transformative technologies of our generation.”"
Yes. Move everything - and I mean everything - in "The Cloud". Switch off connections to cloud for, say, one week. There - transformation, transformation everywhere...
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