6 ms·

> macOS isn't business-level stable amazing how many people here are missing the point. this is not about Windows vs MacOS. Client OS has become a commodity wi

> macOS isn't business-level stable amazing how many people here are missing the point. this is not about Windows vs MacOS. Client OS has become a commodity with prices approaching 0 (MacOS no longer charges for upgrades, neither does iOS or Android) and users care less about how they get to Facebook. Think about server/mobile space. if MS tried to hang on to their dominance simply via desktop lock-in (because it worked in the past) that would be their Kodak moment. All Nadela is doing here is emphasizing efforts on staying competitive in cloud/o365 which is where he thinks they can continue to grow and stay competitive and bring in revenues from enterprise clients. Less and less companies want to lease/run their own windows/database servers, and with technologies like containers a lot of companies are now going with open source solutions.

ynniv 9y ago
Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter. Small to medium businesses perhaps, but all it takes is one downturn that tightens the purse strings, or one critical event that reveals their absolute dependence on a third party. SAAS solutions are fair weather, and while we've had a lot of good weather I don't expect them to be used for critical business functions in the long term.
- SonicSoul 9y ago
  they can still take advantage of existing cloud technologies running on their own servers. And guess what, the CTO and CFO and COO will very much care about licensing cost of each CPU running windows or sql server, vs FREE on Linux.
  - cptskippy 9y ago
    This is where Microsoft is going with Azure. Compared to other platforms, setting up a local instance of Azure is pretty painless and allows you to spin up resources locally that are identical to the Cloud.
  - ynniv 9y ago
    You're thinking about your own app servers. No one cares about the cost of Windows when you're running someone else's proprietary desktop software on it.
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      > No one cares about the cost of Windows when you're running someone else's proprietary desktop software on it This is a small and shrinking corner of the market. Valuable. But still a corner.
      - ynniv 9y ago
        It may be shrinking, but it isn't small.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    > the CTO and CFO and COO will very much care about licensing cost of each CPU running windows or sql server, vs FREE on Linux They haven't really up until now have they? MS licenses are not a big part of the IT budget compared to the people needed to run an in-house data center (typically staffed 24x7)
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter. No, established enterprises (both private and government) are, in the real world, important customers for cloud offerings like Azure, GCP, and AWS.
  - kamaal 9y ago
    During a AWS demonstration at work. The Amazon guy specifically mentioned, AWS is a more lucrative option for large companies than small ones, simply because it was an easy one time way of culling large teams in big companies who were adding very little to nothing in return in value.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      Yeah, that ought to be a great sales line. I'd be wary about how the real world actually deals with that, but there is no lack of large companies jumping on short term costs cuts without looking at the risks.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        From the point of view of upper management in a large enterprise, paying a third party with whom they have an SLA and someone to sue for infrastructure which may go down vs. paying their own staff to build and maintain the infrastructure that may go down often either isn't a difference in risk or, actually, the former seems to be better-managed risk. It's the same reason they often prefer to buy support contracts even for OSS rather than supporting it internally. Part of the analysis that probably gets overlooked from the outside is that employees aren't just a predictable cost they also are a risk.
        marcosdumay 9y ago
        > isn't a difference in risk Really? People incentivised into looking for your best interests vs. a managed organization incentivised into dissolving your contract and gaining on average. I can't imagine anything that could create more different risks. What people seem to do all the time is looking at an SLA and believing the real world must behave the way things are on paper; because there's a signature there. People do this even after being recently burned by the same partner. Some people have the same trust for in house staff, but the usual on high management is to have the exact opposite bias.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  Which is why Microsoft has on-prem and hybrid offerings for most of their products. Actually this is one place where they’re way ahead of AWS and GCE.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    Same with SAP. They have a cloud offering (Hana Enterprise Cloud) which can connect to existing on-premise SAP deployments. That way, they can up-sell existing customers into the cloud and then slowly migrate them to even more subscriptions. Disclaimer: I work at SAP, but not in the same division. And not in sales either, so take my word with a grain of salt. ;)
- empath75 9y ago
  > Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter. I guess the 5 years I spent at a massive tech company shutting down our datacenters didn't happen and all the recruiters offering me huge amounts of money to move their stuff into aws aren't real.
- opmac 9y ago
  > Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter [CITATION NEEDED] This is very myopic. Establishes businesses are huge customers (both current customers and potential customers), for cloud providers.
- freehunter 9y ago
  >Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter You are incredibly unbelievably wrong here. I work for a vendor known for incredibly high prices and have knowledge of basically the entire infrastructure of every one of my clients, and nearly all of them have a massive cloud strategy that's in-place right now. I even have clients shipping their security and compliance logs to the cloud, or sending them from cloud to cloud. Actually the more medium-sized businesses are the ones most hesitant to move to the cloud, because of the lack of cloud expertise on their teams. But even then... it's still a huge strategy. They're all consolidating physical datacenters and using Amazon or Azure or Google.
  - ynniv 9y ago
    I suppose time will tell... Many companies will never do this.
  - charizardd 9y ago
    On the topic of cloud strategies and infrastructure, what are your thoughts on the Mulesoft acquisition? Does this foray into infrastructure software really make it that much easier for CRM to sell the rest of their SaaS stuff? Obviously a lot of CRM and potential CRM customers have hybrid models today, does this really help them dive two feet in with Salesforce for their pending 'digital transformation'? Also, I don't want to get off topic but how does SIEM space fit into the infrastructure stack you see in the future? In security, what about the firewall vendors trying to become the central hub for managing the new security needs brought about by the cloud (CASB, endpoint, virtual firewalls, etc?). What about SaaS only Iidentity & access management solutions like OKta?--I hear they are a game changer, but is a cloud-only solution really the best positioned seller for something like this, especially considering the hybrid structure of most large orgs today (on-prem & off-prem/public cloud)?
    - freehunter 9y ago
      I can’t talk too much about Salesforce and Mulesoft since I’ve never used them and don’t have many clients asking me about them. When it comes to next-gen security appliances, I see them enhancing the SIEM, but not replacing it. Too many regulations require centralized log management, and organizations depend on a central alerting and monitoring platform. I do see these security platforms making the SIEM cheaper and dumber, though. Whether it’s a storage-based pricing like Splunk or an event Rate pricing like QRadar, licensing costs a lot. Which means it costs a lot to feed a bunch of dumb logs into a system that makes information out of dumb logs. As long as you already have a Palo Alto, you might as well feed the IDPS logs into your SIEM and forget the rest: it’s fewer logs, cheaper licensing, and less hardware needed on the SIEM. You already have the Palo doing the intelligence. With regards to hybrid clouds that are popular today, you see a lot of SIEMs go to the cloud. You can ship logs cloud-to-cloud, which saves bandwidth backhauling it to the enterprise. It is a challenge for security logging to get data from there though. Oftentimes it costs extra to send logs, or can’t be done at all. Amazon wants you to use Cloudwatch. Microsoft wants you to use Security Center. It’s a pain to centralize it all. That’s going to have to change.
- manigandham 9y ago
  You have entirely missed the last 2 decades of this happening and at a rapidly accelerating pace. I'm not sure what you think "business critical functions" are but every company outsources at least some important components that could easily put them out of business if something goes wrong, whether that's cloud servers or payroll or manufacturing supply chains, etc. It's called risk analysis and yield management and is well understood by every successful team. When it comes to "someone else's datacenter", I think you'd be surprised at just how few companies even own a datacenter, let alone their own racks. Even the major clouds lease their own space from actual datacenter builders and operators.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  "Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter." Established businesses do this all the time.

ynniv 9y ago

Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter. Small to medium businesses perhaps, but all it takes is one downturn that tightens the purse strings, or one critical event that reveals their absolute dependence on a third party. SAAS solutions are fair weather, and while we've had a lot of good weather I don't expect them to be used for critical business functions in the long term.

SonicSoul 9y ago
they can still take advantage of existing cloud technologies running on their own servers. And guess what, the CTO and CFO and COO will very much care about licensing cost of each CPU running windows or sql server, vs FREE on Linux.
- cptskippy 9y ago
  This is where Microsoft is going with Azure. Compared to other platforms, setting up a local instance of Azure is pretty painless and allows you to spin up resources locally that are identical to the Cloud.
- ynniv 9y ago
  You're thinking about your own app servers. No one cares about the cost of Windows when you're running someone else's proprietary desktop software on it.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > No one cares about the cost of Windows when you're running someone else's proprietary desktop software on it This is a small and shrinking corner of the market. Valuable. But still a corner.
    - ynniv 9y ago
      It may be shrinking, but it isn't small.
- ams6110 9y ago
  > the CTO and CFO and COO will very much care about licensing cost of each CPU running windows or sql server, vs FREE on Linux They haven't really up until now have they? MS licenses are not a big part of the IT budget compared to the people needed to run an in-house data center (typically staffed 24x7)
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter. No, established enterprises (both private and government) are, in the real world, important customers for cloud offerings like Azure, GCP, and AWS.
- kamaal 9y ago
  During a AWS demonstration at work. The Amazon guy specifically mentioned, AWS is a more lucrative option for large companies than small ones, simply because it was an easy one time way of culling large teams in big companies who were adding very little to nothing in return in value.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    Yeah, that ought to be a great sales line. I'd be wary about how the real world actually deals with that, but there is no lack of large companies jumping on short term costs cuts without looking at the risks.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      From the point of view of upper management in a large enterprise, paying a third party with whom they have an SLA and someone to sue for infrastructure which may go down vs. paying their own staff to build and maintain the infrastructure that may go down often either isn't a difference in risk or, actually, the former seems to be better-managed risk. It's the same reason they often prefer to buy support contracts even for OSS rather than supporting it internally. Part of the analysis that probably gets overlooked from the outside is that employees aren't just a predictable cost they also are a risk.
      - marcosdumay 9y ago
        > isn't a difference in risk Really? People incentivised into looking for your best interests vs. a managed organization incentivised into dissolving your contract and gaining on average. I can't imagine anything that could create more different risks. What people seem to do all the time is looking at an SLA and believing the real world must behave the way things are on paper; because there's a signature there. People do this even after being recently burned by the same partner. Some people have the same trust for in house staff, but the usual on high management is to have the exact opposite bias.
Analemma_ 9y ago
Which is why Microsoft has on-prem and hybrid offerings for most of their products. Actually this is one place where they’re way ahead of AWS and GCE.
- majewsky 9y ago
  Same with SAP. They have a cloud offering (Hana Enterprise Cloud) which can connect to existing on-premise SAP deployments. That way, they can up-sell existing customers into the cloud and then slowly migrate them to even more subscriptions. Disclaimer: I work at SAP, but not in the same division. And not in sales either, so take my word with a grain of salt. ;)
empath75 9y ago
> Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter. I guess the 5 years I spent at a massive tech company shutting down our datacenters didn't happen and all the recruiters offering me huge amounts of money to move their stuff into aws aren't real.
opmac 9y ago
> Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter [CITATION NEEDED] This is very myopic. Establishes businesses are huge customers (both current customers and potential customers), for cloud providers.
freehunter 9y ago
>Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter You are incredibly unbelievably wrong here. I work for a vendor known for incredibly high prices and have knowledge of basically the entire infrastructure of every one of my clients, and nearly all of them have a massive cloud strategy that's in-place right now. I even have clients shipping their security and compliance logs to the cloud, or sending them from cloud to cloud. Actually the more medium-sized businesses are the ones most hesitant to move to the cloud, because of the lack of cloud expertise on their teams. But even then... it's still a huge strategy. They're all consolidating physical datacenters and using Amazon or Azure or Google.
- ynniv 9y ago
  I suppose time will tell... Many companies will never do this.
- charizardd 9y ago
  On the topic of cloud strategies and infrastructure, what are your thoughts on the Mulesoft acquisition? Does this foray into infrastructure software really make it that much easier for CRM to sell the rest of their SaaS stuff? Obviously a lot of CRM and potential CRM customers have hybrid models today, does this really help them dive two feet in with Salesforce for their pending 'digital transformation'? Also, I don't want to get off topic but how does SIEM space fit into the infrastructure stack you see in the future? In security, what about the firewall vendors trying to become the central hub for managing the new security needs brought about by the cloud (CASB, endpoint, virtual firewalls, etc?). What about SaaS only Iidentity & access management solutions like OKta?--I hear they are a game changer, but is a cloud-only solution really the best positioned seller for something like this, especially considering the hybrid structure of most large orgs today (on-prem & off-prem/public cloud)?
  - freehunter 9y ago
    I can’t talk too much about Salesforce and Mulesoft since I’ve never used them and don’t have many clients asking me about them. When it comes to next-gen security appliances, I see them enhancing the SIEM, but not replacing it. Too many regulations require centralized log management, and organizations depend on a central alerting and monitoring platform. I do see these security platforms making the SIEM cheaper and dumber, though. Whether it’s a storage-based pricing like Splunk or an event Rate pricing like QRadar, licensing costs a lot. Which means it costs a lot to feed a bunch of dumb logs into a system that makes information out of dumb logs. As long as you already have a Palo Alto, you might as well feed the IDPS logs into your SIEM and forget the rest: it’s fewer logs, cheaper licensing, and less hardware needed on the SIEM. You already have the Palo doing the intelligence. With regards to hybrid clouds that are popular today, you see a lot of SIEMs go to the cloud. You can ship logs cloud-to-cloud, which saves bandwidth backhauling it to the enterprise. It is a challenge for security logging to get data from there though. Oftentimes it costs extra to send logs, or can’t be done at all. Amazon wants you to use Cloudwatch. Microsoft wants you to use Security Center. It’s a pain to centralize it all. That’s going to have to change.
manigandham 9y ago
You have entirely missed the last 2 decades of this happening and at a rapidly accelerating pace. I'm not sure what you think "business critical functions" are but every company outsources at least some important components that could easily put them out of business if something goes wrong, whether that's cloud servers or payroll or manufacturing supply chains, etc. It's called risk analysis and yield management and is well understood by every successful team. When it comes to "someone else's datacenter", I think you'd be surprised at just how few companies even own a datacenter, let alone their own racks. Even the major clouds lease their own space from actual datacenter builders and operators.
s73v3r_ 9y ago
"Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter." Established businesses do this all the time.