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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
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..
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.
No it was calculated on a Pentium processor.
We're going through a process of dumbening.
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.
That's because it was only half of the joke. The other half is that you get 635 days of up time on a two-year contract.
But would it really?
That is to say, is your scenario that downtime of the cloud would result in the loss of a multi-million dollar contract in any way shape or form realistic?
I am no fan of "the cloud" in this context. But is there some aspect of Office 365 (or is this now Office 347?) that would prevent people from making offline copies of their work? Wasn't the idea of the ability of making offline copies via Office 365 one of Micrsoft's earlier advantages over Google.
The cloud may make collaboration easier. The cloud may make presentations easier. But if I were your Customer and you were dumb enough not to have ANY offline backups to send me in lieu of an ongoing Microsoft outage, you'd lose my business for that demonstrated stupidity right there.
Microsoft is promising to be twice as good as Google Apps. Seriously, check it out:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html
For a service level of:
>99.9% - Microsoft: full price, Google: full price
>99.0% - Microsoft: 25% off, Google: 10% off
>95.0% - Microsoft: 50% off, Google: 25% off
<95.0% - Microsoft: 100% off, Google: 50% off
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.