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(a) It would actually indeed be more accurate to quote the difference in assets the donation is causing for you--anything beyond that is arguably being paid by

(a) It would actually indeed be more accurate to quote the difference in assets the donation is causing for you--anything beyond that is arguably being paid by other tax payers. (b) Your analogy isn't actually analogous. If I take a rock from my back yard and attach a price tag of "ten trillion USD" to it, and then donate it to you, would you accept my claim that I donated assets worth ten trillion USD to you? A price that has only been declared by the seller says nothing about the value of the thing the price is attached to. Only a price at which a transaction happened says anything about the value--that is, a price at which someone actually bought what you offered. Now, if they are giving something away for free, that transaction arguably indicates that the value is zero USD.

dogma1138 11y ago
>It would actually indeed be more accurate to quote the difference in assets the donation is causing for you--anything beyond that is arguably being paid by other tax payers. For tax purposes yes I'm not an accountant but MSFT isn't doing this for a tax break and they'll get credit for the actual financial value of their donation based most likely on their operational costs. >Your analogy isn't actually analogous. If I take a rock from my back yard and attach a price tag of "ten trillion USD" to it, and then donate it to you, would you accept my claim that I donated assets worth ten trillion USD to you? My analogy was pretty much correct this isn't an sole actor attributing an arbitrary price, Azure pricing is set by the market not by MSFT. You can assign a defined discrete value for each "resource credit" for Azure, AWS, DigitalOcean, any other IAAS/PAAS service provider out there based on it's market price as these are defacto commodity resources. If you give me a rock which is worth a trillion dollars by your account its really not the same thing unless the market agrees that this rock is worth a trillion dollars either in direct value (e.g. you can sell/buy a rock for that sum) or indirect value (e.g. the amount of resources I would need to spend to find a substitute rock).
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
  > For tax purposes yes I'm not an accountant but MSFT isn't doing this for a tax break and they'll get credit for the actual financial value of their donation based most likely on their operational costs. (a) You were talking abstractly about "donations", not about Microsoft, (b) no, not for tax purposes. If you give someone a million dollars and then are reimbursed, say, a quarter of that by someone else, it's simply dishonest to publicly claim that you donated a million dollars, as (ba) your assets have only decreased by 750000 USD due to the donation, and (bb) because you are taking credit for the quarter million that that other person/entity paid for. > My analogy was pretty much correct this isn't an sole actor attributing an arbitrary price, Azure pricing is set by the market not by MSFT. You can assign a defined discrete value for each "resource credit" for Azure, AWS, DigitalOcean, any other IAAS/PAAS service provider out there based on it's market price as these are defacto commodity resources. Except that you choose to simply ignore one giant transaction in this market that happened only once they selectively reduced the price to zero (or rather, might happen, if people don't still consider that to be too expensive). If they were giving away a hundred dollars worth of services, sure, I'd be willing to accept that as a reasonable method of valuating the donation, but if it's in the same order of magnitude as their total yearly revenue in this area, not so much. Also, it's actually not quite as much a commodity as you make it out to be, because of proprietary interfaces--the different providers certainly are in competition to one another, but one's product is not necessarily a direct substitute for the other's. > If you give me a rock which is worth a trillion dollars by your account its really not the same thing unless the market agrees that this rock is worth a trillion dollars either in direct value (e.g. you can sell/buy a rock for that sum) or indirect value (e.g. the amount of resources I would need to spend to find a substitute rock). A better measure in this case would be how much you could get others to buy it from you for. If your rock massively increases the supply of rocks, that is going to considerably drop the price.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    >(a) You were talking abstractly about "donations", not about Microsoft, (b) no, not for tax purposes. If you give someone a million dollars and then are reimbursed, say, a quarter of that by someone else, it's simply dishonest to publicly claim that you donated a million dollars, as (ba) your assets have only decreased by 750000 USD due to the donation, and (bb) because you are taking credit for the quarter million that that other person/entity paid for. I'm not sure you understand how tax deductions work. Donating to charity allows you to claim a portion of that donation as a deductible, this can vary depending circumstances but in most cases you have a limit for the deductibles for gross income and the amount it self is usually not deducted in full regardless of limits when it comes to non-cash property (this is also gets more complicated because you have carrybacks, other losses, expenses etc.). When Microsoft donates X amount of what ever to some one no one pays MSFT that money back, they might get some tax relief for it that's all this doesn't mean that you as an individual lose money in fact direct donation in many cases is more efficient than indirect funding through taxation. >Except that you choose to simply ignore one giant transaction in this market that happened only once they selectively reduced the price to zero (or rather, might happen, if people don't still consider that to be too expensive). If they were giving away a hundred dollars worth of services, sure, I'd be willing to accept that as a reasonable method of valuating the donation, but if it's in the same order of magnitude as their total yearly revenue in this area, not so much. It doesn't affect the price of the service in any way regardless of what portion of the global XAAS market or MSFT's own XAAS business it is. This simply allows for organizations that would not afford access to these resources at this scale before to have the opportunity to do so. It's also spread across 3 years and includes all MSFT cloud services so Office 365, Skype for Business/Lync, OneDrive etc. which makes is about 1/8th of their currently yearly revenue from cloud products which means overall it's about 1/24th of it's yearly cloud related revenue over the duration of the program. >because of proprietary interfaces--the different providers certainly are in competition to one another, but one's product is not necessarily a direct substitute for the other's. This holds true even if you build your infrastructure and platform in house it's not like MSFT can donate universal credits >A better measure in this case would be how much you could get others to buy it from you for. If your rock massively increases the supply of rocks, that is going to considerably drop the price. I am a non-profit or a school I don't sell rocks but I do need one, not everyone operates a tradable commodity exchange... You don't value the price of donated food at the local homeless soup kitchen by how much you could sell it to some one on the street you value it based on how much you will have to pay to make it on your own. And the people who actually receive the food tend to value it based on how hungry they are....

dogma1138 11y ago

>It would actually indeed be more accurate to quote the difference in assets the donation is causing for you--anything beyond that is arguably being paid by other tax payers. For tax purposes yes I'm not an accountant but MSFT isn't doing this for a tax break and they'll get credit for the actual financial value of their donation based most likely on their operational costs. >Your analogy isn't actually analogous. If I take a rock from my back yard and attach a price tag of "ten trillion USD" to it, and then donate it to you, would you accept my claim that I donated assets worth ten trillion USD to you? My analogy was pretty much correct this isn't an sole actor attributing an arbitrary price, Azure pricing is set by the market not by MSFT. You can assign a defined discrete value for each "resource credit" for Azure, AWS, DigitalOcean, any other IAAS/PAAS service provider out there based on it's market price as these are defacto commodity resources. If you give me a rock which is worth a trillion dollars by your account its really not the same thing unless the market agrees that this rock is worth a trillion dollars either in direct value (e.g. you can sell/buy a rock for that sum) or indirect value (e.g. the amount of resources I would need to spend to find a substitute rock).

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
> For tax purposes yes I'm not an accountant but MSFT isn't doing this for a tax break and they'll get credit for the actual financial value of their donation based most likely on their operational costs. (a) You were talking abstractly about "donations", not about Microsoft, (b) no, not for tax purposes. If you give someone a million dollars and then are reimbursed, say, a quarter of that by someone else, it's simply dishonest to publicly claim that you donated a million dollars, as (ba) your assets have only decreased by 750000 USD due to the donation, and (bb) because you are taking credit for the quarter million that that other person/entity paid for. > My analogy was pretty much correct this isn't an sole actor attributing an arbitrary price, Azure pricing is set by the market not by MSFT. You can assign a defined discrete value for each "resource credit" for Azure, AWS, DigitalOcean, any other IAAS/PAAS service provider out there based on it's market price as these are defacto commodity resources. Except that you choose to simply ignore one giant transaction in this market that happened only once they selectively reduced the price to zero (or rather, might happen, if people don't still consider that to be too expensive). If they were giving away a hundred dollars worth of services, sure, I'd be willing to accept that as a reasonable method of valuating the donation, but if it's in the same order of magnitude as their total yearly revenue in this area, not so much. Also, it's actually not quite as much a commodity as you make it out to be, because of proprietary interfaces--the different providers certainly are in competition to one another, but one's product is not necessarily a direct substitute for the other's. > If you give me a rock which is worth a trillion dollars by your account its really not the same thing unless the market agrees that this rock is worth a trillion dollars either in direct value (e.g. you can sell/buy a rock for that sum) or indirect value (e.g. the amount of resources I would need to spend to find a substitute rock). A better measure in this case would be how much you could get others to buy it from you for. If your rock massively increases the supply of rocks, that is going to considerably drop the price.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  >(a) You were talking abstractly about "donations", not about Microsoft, (b) no, not for tax purposes. If you give someone a million dollars and then are reimbursed, say, a quarter of that by someone else, it's simply dishonest to publicly claim that you donated a million dollars, as (ba) your assets have only decreased by 750000 USD due to the donation, and (bb) because you are taking credit for the quarter million that that other person/entity paid for. I'm not sure you understand how tax deductions work. Donating to charity allows you to claim a portion of that donation as a deductible, this can vary depending circumstances but in most cases you have a limit for the deductibles for gross income and the amount it self is usually not deducted in full regardless of limits when it comes to non-cash property (this is also gets more complicated because you have carrybacks, other losses, expenses etc.). When Microsoft donates X amount of what ever to some one no one pays MSFT that money back, they might get some tax relief for it that's all this doesn't mean that you as an individual lose money in fact direct donation in many cases is more efficient than indirect funding through taxation. >Except that you choose to simply ignore one giant transaction in this market that happened only once they selectively reduced the price to zero (or rather, might happen, if people don't still consider that to be too expensive). If they were giving away a hundred dollars worth of services, sure, I'd be willing to accept that as a reasonable method of valuating the donation, but if it's in the same order of magnitude as their total yearly revenue in this area, not so much. It doesn't affect the price of the service in any way regardless of what portion of the global XAAS market or MSFT's own XAAS business it is. This simply allows for organizations that would not afford access to these resources at this scale before to have the opportunity to do so. It's also spread across 3 years and includes all MSFT cloud services so Office 365, Skype for Business/Lync, OneDrive etc. which makes is about 1/8th of their currently yearly revenue from cloud products which means overall it's about 1/24th of it's yearly cloud related revenue over the duration of the program. >because of proprietary interfaces--the different providers certainly are in competition to one another, but one's product is not necessarily a direct substitute for the other's. This holds true even if you build your infrastructure and platform in house it's not like MSFT can donate universal credits >A better measure in this case would be how much you could get others to buy it from you for. If your rock massively increases the supply of rocks, that is going to considerably drop the price. I am a non-profit or a school I don't sell rocks but I do need one, not everyone operates a tradable commodity exchange... You don't value the price of donated food at the local homeless soup kitchen by how much you could sell it to some one on the street you value it based on how much you will have to pay to make it on your own. And the people who actually receive the food tend to value it based on how hungry they are....