Embrace our cloud, damn you: Microsoft dangles 40% discount on Azure instances Microsoft has started offering substantial Windows Server licence discounts as an incentive to embrace its cloud. Redmond has rolled out its Azure Hybrid Use Benefits scheme, which it says can cut up to 40 per cent off the price of Windows Server virtual instances on Azure. Azure Hybrid Use Benefit covers two-processor and 16 …
Old strategy.
Sufficiently large loss leader to overcome the usual reluctance to change, usually driven by accounting types who will be rewarded for saving money (but not penalised for losing it afterwards) followed by abusing lock in tactics and latency to slowly return and even pass the original prices to claw back what they lost in the loss leader.
No thanks.
For most US companies operating in the EU that would not even be of any help unless you said no (but that's far too sensible). Especially if they don't have an office in the EU (which they only tend to do for tax reasons), you will find that any dispute would have to be argued in the US which with its border policies has pretty much become farawayistan as far as most people are concerned - the cost to sue them is disproportionate to the costs they'll have to defend against any lawsuit. They have this legal disadvantage of their customers pretty much planned into their business model.
Of course, that makes the train wreck called Uber so much fun to watch, but outfits like Microsoft have decades of experience evading lawsuits and abusing the weird feature of US law that you can settle without ever admitting guilt, even if you were caught with matches and lighter fuel next to a burning house..
well, MS told us that 2 billion IT admins in the world use power shell and that we are going to have to take it or die. Now they find out that those windows admin kids that use a mouse don't like typing in cryptic commands at a black promt??? you mean they like using a GUI and are not stuck on using MS DOS apps? Huh
maybe they all learned UNIX and Linux via MacOS????
maybe they all learned UNIX and Linux via MacOS????
Well, I do find that they make quite a nice combination. I just need to find someone who knows how to write in Swift for Mac, I have some small ideas but I suck as a coder (and it needs a GUI as it involves a map :) ).
Powershell is not necessary but don't dare to manage your azure without ultrawide monitor. It gets even worse when you try to do Intune - that Silverlight experience combines the worst of Metro on Windows with craziness their web interface. In the end it's sort of amazing how much can be done with mouse clicks alone (and that it even works) but the back and forth between Azure, Intune and Office 365 plus all the dependencies, licensing and liabilities one may never fully be aware of and intricacies of pricing probably make it a real minefield in real use (but so is running on premise MS environment). I've almost forgotten about constant changes to the interface, names features (with some being discontinued because other didn't embrace them). Get your trial version first. Get a burner phone to register the tenant, use giftcards to run some real world test instance (to find out billing gotchas without having getting debt collectors call you). Then if you're OK sign up MS' servitude agreement (have your lawyers on stand by).
1st hit (almost)free. I bet MS has learned this lesson elsewhere.
I was a little surprised to see TV adverts for the MS Cloud and had to wonder who they were targeting. My first thought was that the ads were targeted at the management level that could authorise the purchase of such services but then realised that's going to be a tiny percentage of the people who have to view the adverts, so there's got to be more behind them.
Now though, I'm wondering if the real purpose behind these ads is actually subversion of internal IT departments.
With current business practices seemingly based upon the principle of take-the-piss & exploit every possibility, paranoia seems to be a reasonable point of view.
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