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Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’
- iddan 5y agoWith fibber internet increasingly becoming standard around the world and 5G it makes perfect sense people will use their computer as a terminal for a more powerful computer in the cloud than buying powerful computers
- wereHamster 5y agom a i n f r a m e :)
- imwillofficial 5y ago> fibber internet increasingly becoming standard around the world and 5G it makes perfect sense Absolutely not, the average connection speeds for 99% of the globe are nowhere near offering a solid desktop experience. Plus, chips are plenty fast days. Rarely do typical uses need to upgrade because of new software.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vlan0 5y agoI wouldn't hold my breath on that one. Last mile ISPs are not optimizing for those traffic patterns. And there really is no incentive for them to do so. For exampe, there's 70ms between my Verizon phone and the PC sitting in front of me on a very well connected network. The traffic goes from WNY > NYC > DC > NYC > CNY > WNY. Very much not optimal. At the same time, AWS us-east1 is 9ms away from my desktop.
- babypuncher 5y agoThe economics still don't work out. Buying a more powerful computer is still probably cheaper after just a year or two.
- tomjen3 5y agoThat would make sense indeed, if the prices for 365 weren't so damm high. And if we had a computer that could be a dumb terminal - it would cost 10-20 dollars, have wifi, ethernet, an HDMI connection and support a mouse and a keyboard.
- mattl 5y agoSo a Raspberry Pi?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tambourine_man 5y agoAny ideia how the prices will be? Windows as a service, if decently priced, would be pretty sweet.
- timdorr 5y agohttps://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/all-pricing https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/all-pricing
- mongol 5y agoseems quite expensive?
- atatatat 5y ago/me can barely contain shock.
- shadilay 5y agoMS B2B pricing has always been high.
- Someone1234 5y agoLooks like they tried to match Amazon Workspaces prices. That doesn't mean it isn't expensive though. I'd call them both niche products that I'd be more interested in developing on if it wasn't so expensive to do so (at 16 GB of RAM). I'm not entirely sure I can describe what the normal deployment scenario looks like (e.g. traveling salesman doesn't work because you'd need too high of internet quality on the road, developer doesn't work as RAM pricing, and in a lot of scenarios you need on-prem hardware to connect to it anyway).
- samspenc 5y agoI was going to say that if they priced it per minute or hour, like some other IaaS offerings, this would have been competitive. I can imagine a developer or occasional user using this for 1-5 hours a day, and then putting it to sleep... But nope, just checked, it's a flat rate per month, irrespective of use, so definitely looks cheaper to just buy a high-end machine and install Windows on it (or Mac + Parallels + Windows like others have noted.)
- neural_thing 5y agoFree trials are paused, not the project.
- tpmx 5y agoPeople love free stuff, news at 11.
- donmcronald 5y ago> including one at the top end that includes eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? I know it's for businesses, but even then, does it come with tooling or something that makes management easier? What justifies an annual cost that is close to the lifetime cost of a physical machine? You still need a physical machine to access "the cloud", so don't you still have all the expensive problems related to managing a fleet of PCs, but now you have to do it x2? Is data security so important that some companies are willing to pay 5x hardware costs and 2x maintenance costs for it? I really don't get it. When I looked at the cost of using Azure for failover on a single server, the conclusion I came to is that it only made sense to run something short term while new hardware was shipped in. Who the heck is buying these VMs that cost 5x real hardware?
- pwinnski 5y agoCompanies amortize capital expenditures, while monthly service costs are a separate line item (operating expenditures). I think there's also a perception that deploying and support physical hardware has higher labor cost associated. If it take one IT staffer per every X PCs, the presumption might be that X is higher when the "PCs" are virtual. But mainly, companies aren't doing what you're doing: looking at the five-year cost. They don't care what it costs over five years, or often even over one year. This quarter, the cost for that beast is $474. Can you deliver an 8-CPU PC with 32GB of RAM for $474? Today? Then the MS offering is better. Also, when you lay off an employee, you get to stop paying for their Windows license, instead of it being a sunk cost. There's definitely a reason they're targeting companies first. The economics make so much more sense in that world.
- donmcronald 5y ago> But mainly, companies aren't doing what you're doing: looking at the five-year cost. They don't care what it costs over five years, or often even over one year. This quarter, the cost for that beast is $474. Can you deliver an 8-CPU PC with 32GB of RAM for $474? Today? Then the MS offering is better. If you're willing to pay $10k over 5 years for a $2k PC, wouldn't there be a ton of financing companies willing to convert the capital expenditure to an operating expenditure for that? Where else can you make 80% annual returns on a capital investment?
- notthedroids 5y agoAnyone else developing on a Mac/Linux desktop, and looking at Windows 365 to run/test/prototype windows applications?
- cowsup 5y agoWindows 365's lowest tier, with only 2GB of RAM, works out to $288/year. If you're on a Mac, you can grab the Pro version of Parallels for $99USD/year and run it locally, and spin up an instance of any version of Windows you need, along with guaranteed uptime and availability. I really don't see Windows 365 as a viable option for most developers, when there are so many better -- and cheaper -- alternatives readily available.
- notthedroids 5y agoIf I would have to pay $100-$200 for the software subscriptions for my Windows VM (windows license, office) it gets close? Especially if Microsoft is also throwing in some hardware so my local computer is taxed less? Of course streaming a cloud desktop introduces its own problems (latency, unreliability, etc) but also advantages (portability, reproducibility, etc)
- CountDrewku 5y agoYou don't really need to pay to license windows if you're just using it for testing.
- notthedroids 5y agoBecause Microsoft permits testing without a license? Or because you believe, in practice, Microsoft will not assert its intellectual property rights against someone who is only testing? (I am personally OK with the first, not the second.)
- CountDrewku 5y agoFunctionally you can use it indefinitely without licensing and only have cosmetic issues in the form of a watermark and some inability to change appearance. Whether this breaks their tos is a bit gray....
- sigstoat 5y agono surprise. the amount of hardware available in azure is tiny. this project probably couldn't get azure to approve them for more VMs.
- burnt_toast 5y agoIt's like we've gone full circle and returned back to timesharing / terminals. Except now we don't have to pay for the mainframe up front lol
- dotcommand 5y ago"significant demand", "sold out", etc. Considering this is microsoft and theverge, this "news" story is just paid PR/ad like so much of these type of stories are.
- nix23 5y agoOne could see i that way, i would see it as: Microsoft has still problems with scaling ;)
- cududa 5y agoArtificial scarcity isn’t really Microsoft’s thing. To your point, their clients are militaries, world governments, etc. They’d never risk their standing on meeting demand whenever/ wherever for a marketing ploy.
- nix23 5y ago> their clients are militaries, world governments Those are looong lasting projects with years of planing prior rollout...your example is the opposite to scaling NOW.
- Shadonototro 5y agoAzure can't scale? I can't imagine this happening with AWS, what a horrible PR
- tester756 5y agoIf AWS started offering resources for free, then they'd have to pause it within 4h since announcement and I'm pretty optimistic I think
- count 5y ago...they offer a ton of stuff for free.
- tester756 5y agowithin boundaries
- tehbeard 5y agoThey have a wide berth of items, with varying levels of free-ness... and none of it to an extent that would cause a resource drain like this. All of AWS free tier is either low impact resource wise (Couple thousand emails out per day, or metered to the lowest option, like a single t2.micro (Shared CPU, 1GB ram)
- orf 5y agoTheir free tier is well supported and pretty generous.
- raxxorrax 5y agoIt is generous, but you still get above the limit fairly quickly. Difficult metric to begin with and hard to judge how much CPU time anything takes. I think you need to supply payment information to use it and I believe this is pretty lucrative for Amazon. At this point you already caught half the fish.
- tester756 5y ago>includes eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month >for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? lol? I'd want to see benchmark difference because I don't believe it
- adamcik 5y agoI wonder how much of this is free trial abuse like https://therecord.media/crypto-mining-gangs-are-running-amok-on-free-cloud-computing-platforms/ https://therecord.media/crypto-mining-gangs-are-running-amok... and how much was real trials?
- breakfastduck 5y agoChrist we're going back to RDPs. Nooooooo
- lazypenguin 5y agoGoing back? My current employer never left…
- londons_explore 5y agoWhen you use a stolen credit card to use these to mine Monero...