8 ms·
Microsoft will donate $1B in cloud services to nonprofits and universities
- teddyh 11y agoSo they are giving away, to educational institutions, a limited amount of a consumable resource which is amenable to lock-in effects (i.e. addictive), and problematic for privacy (i.e. harmful to users). In effect, they are standing outside schools giving away cigarettes.
- random_rr 11y agoEvel Knievel couldn't have made that leap.
- necessity 11y agoWhat cloud service would not have those issues? I think it's a great thing. People already use Azure or some other provider at these institutes (I know my uni does). If Microsoft wants to trade free services for market share, everyone partaking benefits from it -- unlike cigarrets at schools. If you or your institution don't want to partake, don't. I know I won't.
- xg15 11y agoEvery cloud service would have, indeed. But there is no reason the support has to be "free" access to cloud resources at all. Why not just donate the money and let the nonprofits choose which cloud to use (or whether to use a cloud at all)?
- nrb 11y agoBecause if you give 1 billion dollars away, you are 1 billion less wealthy. If you give away 1 billion dollars worth of Azure credits, you are some much smaller percentage of 1 billion less wealthy, and the recipient is still receiving 1 billion in value.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago> you are some much smaller percentage of 1 billion less wealthy, and the recipient is still receiving 1 billion in value. Would you mind explaining how one can create value merely by donating?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- xg15 11y agoOnly because you declare that something has the value of 1 billion doesn't make it so. First, you're not giving away physical goods, but eligibility for a service - but what exactly this service entails and how useful it is can still change in the future. Second, it's a service that requires a substantial level of commitment from your clients - a commitment that causes risks for the clients in its own (lock-in) as discussed in many other places in this thread.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- vcjohnson 11y ago>In effect, they are standing outside schools giving away cigarettes. Jesus Christ...
- bdavisx 11y agoSo without knowing more details, without some special effort on the nonprofits side, I'm guessing this will lock them into an Azure architecture. That could be OK if MS continues the donations after the initial $1B runs out, otherwise it could end up costing the nonprofits/.edu's more in the long run than if they went with a more open path now.
- partiallypro 11y agoYou can use only open source software in Azure if you like. I don't really understand your complaint. You could even migrate your VMs elsewhere.
- Jedd 11y agoNever entirely sure how to take some of these announcements. Prima facie it sounds great and laudable ... but I'm old, and my memory is full of stories of similar-sounding attempts to get youth mindshare with dubious subsidies of gear into schools, and the old classic of $100m to fund HIV research, $400m to fund ways to destroy GNU/Linux. [1] I know - people tell me - it's a whole new Microsoft these days. [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/13/gates_gives_100m_to_fight/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/13/gates_gives_100m_to_...
- tetrep 11y agoIndeed. Unless there's a promise of migration support once funs inevitably run out or some sort of lifetime fixed price/discount, such that the nonprofits or whatever can make an informed decision about the real cost of their infrastructure once it's no longer free, this is nothing but a terrible trap. I'd hate to see organizations suckered into this only to find that it has unsustainable costs once the freebies dry up and whatever pains come from attempting to migrate to some other platform/service and/or back onto local servers.
- bithive123 11y agoSmart organizations won't adopt even free services without a contract of some kind.
- jmspring 11y agoOne can certainly design one's apps in such a way where the cloud provider doesn't necessarily matter -- docker containers running on VMs, for instance. If you use a bunch of things like SQL Server, Document DB, etc. that is certainly much harder to migrate than PostgreSQL running on a VM.
- NetStrikeForce 11y agoVery good point. You could leverage Docker and an overlay networking solution like ours[1] to abstract yourself from the provider APIs and even the network itself. [1] https://wormhole.network https://wormhole.network
- avar 11y agoBetween this and the ChakraCore news item on the front page I've been wondering whether Microsoft really has been changed its behavior since the 90s, or whether this is just how they play the game when they're not in a position of strength as they are with node.js and cloud services. It's pretty telling from the ChakraCore thread not entirely being "They're obviously trying to embrace, extend, extinguish node.js like they did Java" that people have either forgotten their modus operandi, or that I'm too much of a cynic and they've genuinely changed. Sometimes I think I'm being too cynical and they're now just as "nice" as some other companies which have a mostly healthy relationship with open source & open architectures. But then again all the news where they're being more open these days have to do with areas where they don't have established lock-in, including projects like .Net & ChakraCore which formed the basis of some of the major projects where they lost the lock-in wars. Are they just trying to lure users they've lost back into their sphere of influence so they can tighten the noose again, or are they genuinely doing business differently now? I don't know, but it's hard to place any trust in them when you've been burned so many times, and even though they have a new CEO middle management & their business model has a lot of inertia.
- sremani 11y agoPosts like this remind me of the quote in N.N.Taleb's Antifragile book, The mind fights yesterday's war, but the body fights tomorrow's war (in the context of biological systems under stress). Some minds here are fighting a decade old war and no good deed goes unpunished in HN comments.
- awakeasleep 11y agoThats possible. But tales like Aesop's fable of The Scorpion and the Frog have reverberated with humanity since prehistoric times for a reason, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
- x5n1 11y agoLook they released their Javascript engine with no JIT compiler for Linux. It's the same Microsoft because they are in it for money and dominance. A leopard can't change its spots. Microsoft will always be the same, no matter what they say. They are simply changing themselves to be more like Google because they know their old strategy does not work in the new world. If anything it's Microsoft which is fighting yesterday's war with today's strategy.
- ralmidani 11y agoThis is the same old strategy of giving students discounts which get them accustomed to proprietary products, then marketing to those same students when they graduate. Now it's just adapted for remotely-hosted software.
- x5n1 11y agoHow many successful startups have actually been built on top on Microsoft software. I know Plenty of Fish is one example, but you just don't hear of that many examples of successful startups built on top of Microsoft's stack. The reason being that paying Microsoft's tax as you scale eats into your profits and your growth.
- deweerdt 11y agoMySpace had (has?) an MS stack, and it was called successful at one point.
- biot 11y agoI'm sure a few here have run across Stack Overflow. edit: http://highscalability.com/stack-overflow-architecture http://highscalability.com/stack-overflow-architecture
- jenscow 11y agoThe article confirms: It's hard to separate out the Microsoft stack and the scale up approach because for licensing reasons they tend to go together. If you find yourself in the position of transitioning from scale up to scale out by adding dozens of cores, MS licensing will bite you.
- ggreer 11y agoThe criticisms here remind me of The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics[1]: > The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular. Microsoft is giving away a billion dollars worth of services, yet people are criticizing them for it. There are several reasons why that's unwarranted. First, universities and non-profits don't have to choose Microsoft. If they think the risks of lock-in or later expenses will outweigh the donated services, they won't pick it. These organizations aren't populated by idiots, and Microsoft makes the terms of their deals clear before any contracts are entered. There's no coercion or trickery. Second, when it comes to these sorts of discounts, Microsoft is late to the party. AWS gives free stuff to schools and non-profits. Apple has education discounts. People would be outraged if these companies ended these discounts. Yet people are outraged at Microsoft for offering similar discounts. You can't have it both ways. Third, I seriously doubt that Microsoft is doing this as a purely cynical, profit-seeking move. I can't find any mention of a time limit on the free services. Not in Nadella's announcement. Not in responses to Q&A. Nowhere. There's also the fact that, for the past couple of years, Microsoft has been giving Office 365 away to non-profits and schools. Once they validate your organization (to make sure you're not trying to scam them), they give it away, for free, forever. What's the ulterior motive there? That people might use it, like it, and pay for it at home or at a different job? That's completely unobjectionable. One last point: People like to accuse companies of predatory discounts, but nobody brings up the opposite. What about the countless free-loaders who use as much of a service as they can without paying, then move on to something else? I've seen people brag about using free servers from Rackspace, AWS, and Azure, with no intention of paying those companies a cent. As soon as the discount runs out, they move on. There is little condemnation of these tactics. If anything, many social circles celebrate them. This is a clear double-standard. 1. http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...
- ntakasaki 11y ago
- jessaustin 11y agoI suspect this move is somewhat motivated by the "first hit is free" strategy as other commentators have speculated. This is probably secondary, however, to the fact that Azure has been temporarily overbuilt (or, somewhat equivalently, over-contracted). That is, they bought all of this equipment, fewer people than expected are using it, so instead of just dropping the price for their services this seemed more interesting. It also happens to be easier to construe as "evil" than dropping the price would have been, so I'm not sure they'll come out ahead in terms of PR...
- gooserock 11y ago"First one's free."
- banku_brougham 11y ago$1B * COGS / Retail Price A $200M donation?
- discordance 11y agoThere seems to be a lot of concern these days about platform lock in with Microsoft's new found philanthropic initiatives. If one were to stick to IaaS, using only Azure hosted Linux VMs and not get involved in any special Azure PaaS offerings, then any project hosted under this model could easily avoid platform lock in and be transported to another service provider at any time.
- godgod 11y agoForgive me but I can't help but suspect that Microsoft is only offering these cloud services to nonprofits and universities because they are a front for the NSA. Microsoft has had a long dirty history of being in bed with the NSA and their latest "free" operating system Windows 10 is nothing more than another mechanism for the NSA to master the human domain by controlling and tracking everything we do on their operating system.
- verusfossa 11y agoSeeing what Microsoft has done recently with privacy on their newest operating system, I would not have high hopes for their cloud services. Of course the organizations should be weighing all the pros and cons but I share the sentiment that once the freebie well dries up, terms might be re-evalutaed or services held hostage. Also, and I know the OneDrive plan shakeup fiasco is not apples to apples[0], but I'm sure these free plans could suffer a similar fate. With this, it's not necessarily as easy as moving mom's photo album back to your desktop. I know the Univeristy of Wisconsin used to roll its own email, but recently started using Outlook acounts for everything and I'm definitely not a fan. Migration was painful or it at least seemed so. If orgs are able to isolate their architecture from the cloud and services, it might work out. Unfortunately, a lot of companies and organizations treat aggregate privacy like a preference instead of a requirement. Bartering chips. My cynicism may be unfounded, but a company by the same name helped write the book on fostering lock-in not too long ago. [0] http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/3/9662414/microsoft-reduces-free-onedrive-storage-15-to-5-gb-removes-unlimited http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/3/9662414/microsoft-reduces-...
- simonebrunozzi 11y agoTitle should change to: "Microsoft is donating several Billion dollars worth of lock-in into their proprietary technologies".
- kenjackson 11y agoWould you feel the way if Apple donated $1B worth of iPads and iPhones? I feel like most people wouldn't, yet it also lock-in into their proprietary technology.
- ginko 11y ago>Would you feel the way if Apple donated $1B worth of iPads and iPhones? Yeah
- jupiter90000 11y agoMy favorite part is this piece: "Cloud services can unlock the secrets held by data in ways that create new insights and lead to breakthroughs" How's that? Am I missing something?
- outside1234 11y agoBig Data Processing? Machine Learning on that data? I can think of lots of ways the cloud can help.
- jupiter90000 11y agoCloud services alone don't make what is said possible. Perhaps they'll be able to afford specialists to build what you are thinking of with the money saved from the Microsoft granted credits? Won't the university or non-profit need to hire a 'big data engineer' to build something using the services? Also analysts to know what to look for? The statement makes it sound as if the cloud can unlock it, but it's really people trained to know how to use the cloud to unlock it that make it possible, in my opinion.
- cowardlydragon 11y agoMS knows that computing habits for "work" start mainly in university, so this is really just marketing not charity.
- shorsusan1 11y agoAs a student, I prefer Google. The integration or multi-platform services of Google is better. I got free Microsoft services from my school but I never use it.