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Microsoft To Offer Azure Credits To Compete With IBM, AWS
Amanda Parker writes Google, AWS and IBM already offer incentives for start-ups to join them. Microsoft is trying to lure start-ups and SME's to its Azure profile by offering them $500,000 in Azure credits. The deal, announced by Y Combinator, is only available to Y Combinator-backed companies and will be offered to the 2015 Winter and future batches. In addition to this, Microsoft is also giving Y Combinator start-ups a three years Office 365 subscription, access to Microsoft developer staff and one year of free CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services. The move signifies Microsoft's desire to compete with Amazon Web Services and Google, both of whom already offer credits and freebies.
I talked it over with my wife and she just doesn't like that color.
Sorry Microsoft.
Maybe change it to mauve.
... to do the "developers developers developers ..." dance. Or is he going to get creative and do "start ups ... start ups... start ups..."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Please, come back!
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
just no.
I'm not sure why IBM is listed as being a major competitor to AWS and Azure for cloud hosting. I always thought that Rackspace,Google, and Salesforce.com were bigger players in that arena.
at first, microsoft offered Azure to the general public with a free trial and a smile. AWS, VPS, dedicated hosting, and shared hosting already existed, and offered an endless selection of linux and bsd whereas microsoft offered exactly 1 linux image and it was nearly double the cost of windows.
Then microsoft buttered up corporations with free azure credits in their licensing fees. Refusal of the credits meant an increase in fees, so most corporations took them only to realize they werent very applicable. Hosted exchange an in-house microsoft products were still in most cases more established and cheaper than Azure. They afforded greater accountability and control over the reboot cycle as well. Microsoft recently started revoking, quietly, these credits.
now, like a drunken pimp, microsoft is peddling azure to...startups. Most of these companies are actively developing and using technologies that scale far beyond Windows and traditional servers, and always have. What for microsoft is a new offering is something these companies have already established api code and configuration automation with. Yes, you can convert from X provider to azure easily, but microsoft hasnt offered a compelling reason why you should outside of pricing. And then theres the glaring problem of portability and relevance. Microsofts other internet offerings, bing and explorer, no seasoned developer or devops engineer can approach on a full stomach. decades of lock in, embrace extend extinguish, and the fond memory of the last pain-in-the-ass bug they had to code around for IE because it was a "market leader" is largely enough to make them skip it. Microsoft hasnt given any compelling evidence to suggest they wont lock in the infrastructure you build, but they have provided a wealth of historical evidence to suggest they plan to.
Good people go to bed earlier.
But their enterprise focus is extremely helpful. I manage our cloud relationships and dealing with MS as a business entity, and especially when it's concerning legal and regulatory matters, Microsoft is a *pleasure* to work with. Amazon on the other hand, is totally unavailable and seems to want to cater only to companies that start out in basements. That's fine, but given MS' focus on 'cloud' as a whole I don't see it being too long until MS catches up to AWS and even surpasses them.
On the licensing front they are miles ahead; they offer Oracle, SAP, and other things that AWS does not in prebuilt VMs. And to be frank... I have no issues with the service as I can compare and contrast them with AWS which we also use heavily. Only downside is that RedHat isn't offered at Azure, but given the per hour/minute licensing costs we've opted to look more heavily into CentOS.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Microsoft has long had several programs that gave away Azure credits:
Website Spark - you got about £35 a month in credits.
BizSpark - you got about £105 a month in credits.
BizSpark Plus - you got anything from £200,000 in credits in the first two years, to all of your Azure paid for for that period, depending on how hard you pressed your MS rep.
Been there, done all of the above three options. BizSpark Plus has been around for more than 5 years.
Shouldn't the history of how Microsoft acts when it achieves hegemony in a market weigh on any decision to use their services? A "death before Microsoft" attitude isn't rational, of course, but throwing your lot in with them should be very carefully considered.
If Azure managed to put all the other cloud providers out of business (and that has always been Microsoft's goal in every market, much more so than profit), you would end up with a cloud service locked into Windows that was just cheap and high quality enough to keep you from switching. Since switching would face the massive barrier of moving off Windows, Office, Outlook, and the rest of the MS ecosystem, the cloud service wouldn't even need to be all that cheap or high quality.
Similar situation with Windows phones and tablets. If Windows replaced Android, you'd end up with stagnation and devices locked to the Windows desktop OS in whatever ways possible, just good enough to keep you from giving in and accepting whatever Apple has decided you can buy (as the strength of Windows has always been the variety of hardware available, verses Apple).
Usually, when dealing with a business, you can trust them to make every effort to profit off you. With Microsoft, you don't even get that. Their goal has always been to trap you. That should always be kept in mind when dealing with them.
So really once you learn that you realize that Azure just is not safe to use for your company.
Microsoft went to the market with $60K, then AWS and Google countered with $100K, then IBM joined with $120K... it's not a desperate move, otherwise they are all desperate. It's just business, and right now it's an arms race of who can make a bigger number. It's not very different to a $0 phone plan with $100000 worth of features included, what you actually get for those credits is what counts, but the market is still maturing so they just go 'number sounds bigger, I'll take that'. It'll change. This stuff will phase out and the conversations will be about benefits, channels, partnerships, etc.
They seems to be replicating BING business strategy
Casteism
One of the biggest problems we found with Azure is their firewall fiddling with your packets. Their service looked promising in terms of price and performance, then we found they were stripping tcp options and not allowing ICMP. There's a couple of long threads with lots of annoyed developers who have had to walk away.
Typical Microsoft.