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Office 365: Suffer 18 Days' Outage, Still Pay Half Price
rtfa-troll writes "Microsoft is preparing its customers for plenty of outage time according to the Register, with a scheme for Office 365 which will give customers some money back. The offer seems to be Microsoft's answer to Google offering a '100% uptime guarantee' (they even pay for maintenance time) The most interesting thing about the scheme is that you can have a one and a half day outage every month (or is that 18 solid days a year?) and still expect to pay half price. I wonder Microsoft have put the Sidekick management in charge of their customer's data. Looking forward my expense forms have getting eaten by the cloud so I have to fill them in again."
That's awful, a plain-jane Windows server manages way better uptime than that!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't think it is called Office 356.
Time to offend someone
Someone trying to make a clever joke and forgot that 365 - 18 is actually 347?
at 99% uptime, isn't that .3 days downtime/month, or 3.6 days/year?
Of outage? Looking closely at google apps...
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
I thought it was supposed to be a joke, but 365-18 = 347, so I guess not. If the story was titled "Office 347," well, that'd be pretty witty.
rooooar
Looking forward my expense forms have getting eaten by the cloud so I have to fill them in again.
Especially this early in the life cycle of this "cloud" crap. Any expectation of not loosing your data if you don't keep a backup yourself is entirely your own fault.
Besides, I though we left terminal computing (either smart or dumb) back in the '80's. Screw that crap, I'll keep my data and aps on my own computer, thank you.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Compare that with the uptime that typically have in any windows installation running the old office, for which you pay the full price, at least, if you access the new online version from a non-ms browser/operating system.
"Looking forward my expense forms have getting eaten by the cloud so I have to fill them in again." Yikes. I still don't understand why so many people treat Web forms like typewriters - write once, read never.
Oh, wait, that s--- is going to cost money? I should have known, I suppose. Oh Microsoft, so close and yet so far away.
The cloud is horribly unreliable. You should continue using Windows and Office instead.
-- Microsoft.
(+1, Disagree)
... is that more than 18 days of downtime results in a complete refund, 4 to 18 days of downtime results in a 50% refund, and 8 hours to 4 days of downtime results in a 25% refund. (Calculations are assuming 1 year of service, though I don't know how Microsoft does it.)
This is not what I would call excellent, but it is several orders of magnitude better than the summary suggested.
And to top it off, it is reportedly going to cost different prices dependent on where you live. From what I have read Even though the Aussie $ is higher than U.S. $ at the moment, we are going to pay up to 76% more (microsoft-office-365-cost-aust-companies-76%-more)
Come on, guys. It's just a SLA. You get a full refund if it's more than 5% downtime (18.25 days). You get half off for 99% to 95% uptime , and 25% off for 99.9% to 99%. Do you really think they're expecting to give these refunds? No. But it's there in a contract just in case. I doubt many people will even get the 25% refund. 99.9% isn't by any means terrible.
Write an article when it actually goes down. The mindless /. MS bashing needs to stop.
I actually thought the assurances were descent. Try looking at the SLA for your other cloud products to compare. Plus I've had Microsoft hosted Exchange for almost 2 years now and can't remember a single outage.
But what's sad is that the title of this 'article' and summary tries so obviously and desperately to frame the SLA in the worse possible light.
How about reporting something newsworthy, like the fact that Microsoft released Windows Phone 7.5 Beta 2 ( Mango release ) to the entire development community yesterday.
We use Microsoft's current online offering, and we've had both a 25% and a 50% refund in the last year and a half. the refund doesn't even begin to make up for the sales losses and confusion when our dealers can't get their orders through to us.
The no-cost MS alternative to free Google Docs is SkyDrive (which has Office Web integrated with it). This discusses the paid option, which is competing with a different Google product.
Of course, you don't get any uptime guarantees for that $0, neither from Google nor from MS.
From what I have read Even though the Aussie $ is higher than U.S. $ at the moment, we are going to pay up to 76% more.
Waterproof packets don't come cheap.
Blank until
Dear Valued Customer;
We apologize that the recent outage has caused you to lose the multi-million dollar contract. Here is a check for $2000 to compensate for the down time.
Sincerely,
Microsoft
That's the norm.
This is from several years back - and the author doesn't even host the page anymore because it's outdated, but other than exact figure details, very much still applies:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090501014507/http://www.amanwithapencil.com/adobe.html
See also the excuses Adobe uses for the price differentiation:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090504203050/http://www.amanwithapencil.com/adobe_spin.html
This applies to practically all of the larger software companies. E.g. Adobe, Microsoft, Autodesk, Apple
I'm not a MS hater. I use Windows and it's alright for what it does.
But Microsoft's online services, especially their websites, have been and still are absolutely terrible. They never worked in all [standard compliant] browsers, they are a mess to navigate and to find anything. Even Bill Gates said it once, BTW.
There are a few exceptions of course. Bing Maps looks decent to me. But overall, MS needs to catch up badly. It's not the 90s anymore.
This forces Microsoft to put their ass on the line and deliver.
If Microsoft risks losing half its revenue, they are going to spend the resources to prevent it.
Let me if I understand office 365 correctly my company can place all of it's data on the internet in one spot, everything from Documents to Emails? If this is the case they when dont I just cut out the middle man let wiki-leaks host all my Intellectual Property?
I give 7 months before the first Fortune 500 company wide data dump. 2 months to decide to go on the MS-Cloud , 5 months for the implementation and 72 hours before its hacked.
From TFA
Under the service level agreement, [Office 365] customers receive 25 per cent off their monthly payment if uptime falls below 99.9 per cent to 99 per cent, half of the sum back if it falls below 99 per cent and a complete refund for anything under 95 per cent.
Compare this with the google apps SLA and you'll see MSFT's is actually better.
Monthly uptime = Credit given
99.9% to 99.0% = 3 Day credit (MSFT gives 7.5 days)
99.0% to 95.0% = 7 Day credit (MSFT gives 15 days)
Under 95.0% = 15 Day credit (MSFT gives 30 days)
It's worth noting that these are both just SLAs. There was no mention of any downtime actually happening for either service
Besides, I though we left terminal computing (either smart or dumb) back in the '80's. Screw that crap, I'll keep my data and aps on my own computer, thank you.
Programs and data may belong to your employer and not to you.
The terminal was a desk-bound heavyweight. The smartphone or tablet is fragile, feather-light by comparison, easily mislaid and a magnet for thieves.
"John, the Penquin Club called to say you left your laptop behind at the bar."
Office 365 can be bundled with a subscription or lease for full - local - install of the MS Office suite beginning at $16/mo, as I recall.
True; OTOH in any practical sense, it's not like they can let the up time slip. It would kill there pay business.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sure you do. If there's any downtime on the free services, you get a 100% refund for every minute.
Honestly, software is just getting bloated making it worse & worse. 99% of what people do can still be done on version of word & excel that ran on windows 2.11. How about a guarantee to never add any more crap to the software?
The real expense isn't actually the cost of the service. The real expense is the LOST PRODUCTIVITY. That does not get compensated in form by any vendor. Frankly they could offer it for free for a year and not cover the cost of the lost productivity for a single day for a heavy office application user. 99.9% reliability means 8.76 hours of downtime per year. Someone making $20/hour would cost $175. Add in the fact that they presumably are there because their services are more valuable than their salary (otherwise why hire them?) and you can add on even more cost. Our at breakeven our company brings in revenue of about $100,000 per employee per year which for 240 working days works about to about $416/day. A seat of LibreOffice or even Microsoft Office is cheap compared with lost productivity.
Furthermore no matter how reliable a "cloud" services vendor might be, they can never be more reliable than the internet and power connections of the customer. Getting an uptime guarantee from the ISP is not cheap and you also have to have backup power to ensure computers function when the lights go out. I've had outages where I live of several hours at least 3 times in the past 12 months.
Cloud computing has its advantages but the economic advantages are still pretty unclear for most of us.
Refunds are for indy developers and people who have to give a crap about their customers.
At least Microsoft isn't charging you $60 for a monocle for Clippy.
So, to take the original poster's comment that 36 hour outage in a month yields a 50% refund on service fees, that seems OK, I mean, it's 95% uptime (365-18)/365 * 100 = 95%. Would I like it if my service went down for 18 hours straight? No, of course not - but what is the suggested compensation for a 36-hour outage? 100% refund for the month despite giving the user 28 1/2 days of uninterrupted service?
What does Google offer for a 36 hour (1 1/2 day) outage? Amazon? I suspect this is actually a generous commitment from MS compared with other vendors in the space, but the Anti-MS bias forces the original poster to turn everything around and flaunt their ignorance of the subject.
If you can't afford for access to cloud services to go down, you shouldn't be on a cloud service.
Ken
Is this just a troll post or can't the submitter read? First that link source specifically says that Google isn't changing to 100% uptime but is keeping their recently updated 99.99% uptime. Additionally the 99.99% uptime SLA only applies to Google Apps business customers who are paying for service not consumers.
A quick search on Microsoft's Office 365's product page states: "Financially-backed, guaranteed 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA)". The service level commitment states drops below 99.9% uptime in any given month is eligible for a service credit using the following chart:
99.9% = 25% Service Credit
99% = 50% service credit
95% = 100% service credit.
The full SLA details can be found in the online services document at: http://microsoftvolumelicensing.com/DocumentSearch.aspx?Mode=3&DocumentTypeId=37
Maybe a new business model for the hacktivist groups...
They have to give a discount to poorer countries to get customers.
*ducks*
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
Once someone has a day and a half of downtime they aren't going to care about getting half of their money back. Instead they will want a full refund and damages. I know in some situations, even for smaller businesses, that downtime could easily cost thousands of dollars. Unfortunately for Microsoft, there may not be a lot of people using their software in the future even if they make it free.
I am dealing with a issue where I have a user that has a pretty large email box on live mail, and it chokes when it tries to download via outlook connector... But yet gmail w/ imap just rocks right along. I have a feeling that their office 365 will be the same. There is just something about lots of traffic, and data storage that Microsoft has issues handling.
Google promises 99.99% uptime as what they deliver, but, as clearly stated in the links that were included in the article, they start paying for outage time from the very first minute. It's a commitment to keep working towards 100% uptime and that's a pretty clear difference compared to Microsoft. Maybe you can't read?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();