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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."
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.
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.