Microsoft will donate $1B in cloud services to nonprofits and universities
blogs.microsoft.com
blogs.microsoft.com
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/13/gates_gives_100m_to_...
I'd hate to see organizations suckered into this only to find that it has unsustainable costs once the freebies dry up and whatever pains come from attempting to migrate to some other platform/service and/or back onto local servers.
If you use a bunch of things like SQL Server, Document DB, etc. that is certainly much harder to migrate than PostgreSQL running on a VM.
I remain skeptical that MS has changed its basic playbook.
P.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
For example, they started funding OpenSSL and other core infrastructure[1] projects of the Linux foundation after the Heartbleed fiasco. But you don't find that kind of news on here.
By the way "$400m to fund ways to destroy GNU/Linux" seems to be quite hyperbolic, especially coming from 'The Register'. The link in the article goes to a 404 page, do you have any real details of the so called campaign?
[1] https://threatpost.com/group-backed-by-google-microsoft-to-h...
Agreed on range of perception of deeds of any large company. Microsoft has long form on this front (baiting the education market), though they're certainly not the only organisation to have done this. Unlike other student discounts - say for movie tickets, public transport, etc - there's a clear and obvious future payback for providing free or heavily discounted software & services to that demographic, as opposed to just charging less to customers who can't afford full price.
Also, IIRC it's a requirement in the USA that public (and not-NFP) companies must always act to 'increase shareholder value', so the giving away of products or services could be considered a legal exposure. The obvious way to work around this concern is to label it marketing, which brings us back to where we came in.
EDIT: Sorry - misread your 404 question -- try these:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030604185301/http://economicti...
https://web.archive.org/web/20030604185306/http://economicti...
There is no such requirement.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-...
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-cor...
>EDIT: Sorry - misread your 404 question -- try these:
I read those and I don't find anything to justify OPs "$400m to fund ways to destroy GNU/Linux" or The Register's characterization of '$421m to fight Linux".
Actually, you do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639707 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639835
Some people have longer memories than others.
Now it's just adapted for remotely-hosted software.
edit: http://highscalability.com/stack-overflow-architecture
It's hard to separate out the Microsoft stack and the scale up approach because for licensing reasons they tend to go together. If you find yourself in the position of transitioning from scale up to scale out by adding dozens of cores, MS licensing will bite you.
Sure. But how is Azure and Microsoft cloud services any more proprietary than AWS or Google's offerings?
The 1 billion number sounds impressive on its own - wonder how many credits Amazon has given away by now?
Lets hope MS reaches out to github or vice-versa so they can get added to the student pack:
It's pretty telling from the ChakraCore thread not entirely being "They're obviously trying to embrace, extend, extinguish node.js like they did Java" that people have either forgotten their modus operandi, or that I'm too much of a cynic and they've genuinely changed.
Sometimes I think I'm being too cynical and they're now just as "nice" as some other companies which have a mostly healthy relationship with open source & open architectures.
But then again all the news where they're being more open these days have to do with areas where they don't have established lock-in, including projects like .Net & ChakraCore which formed the basis of some of the major projects where they lost the lock-in wars.
Are they just trying to lure users they've lost back into their sphere of influence so they can tighten the noose again, or are they genuinely doing business differently now?
I don't know, but it's hard to place any trust in them when you've been burned so many times, and even though they have a new CEO middle management & their business model has a lot of inertia.
Some minds here are fighting a decade old war and no good deed goes unpunished in HN comments.
But tales like Aesop's fable of The Scorpion and the Frog have reverberated with humanity since prehistoric times for a reason, too.
If anything it's Microsoft which is fighting yesterday's war with today's strategy.
For me at least, such a company would have to spend as much or more time pushing this new open idea than they did pushing the Embrace Extend Extinguish model.
Some people are more forgiving than me but I agree with the parents skepticism about how the openness seems to largely be in areas where they already lost the lockin wars.
Not at all. My very first thought was "this is just good old Microsoft, giving free stuff to schools to catch users early".
But they haven't extinguished Java yet. Unfortunately. And it seems it's going to be around for a long time.
I think it's a great thing. People already use Azure or some other provider at these institutes (I know my uni does). If Microsoft wants to trade free services for market share, everyone partaking benefits from it -- unlike cigarrets at schools. If you or your institution don't want to partake, don't. I know I won't.
But there is no reason the support has to be "free" access to cloud resources at all. Why not just donate the money and let the nonprofits choose which cloud to use (or whether to use a cloud at all)?
Would you mind explaining how one can create value merely by donating?
First, you're not giving away physical goods, but eligibility for a service - but what exactly this service entails and how useful it is can still change in the future.
Second, it's a service that requires a substantial level of commitment from your clients - a commitment that causes risks for the clients in its own (lock-in) as discussed in many other places in this thread.
Jesus Christ...
> The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.
Microsoft is giving away a billion dollars worth of services, yet people are criticizing them for it. There are several reasons why that's unwarranted.
First, universities and non-profits don't have to choose Microsoft. If they think the risks of lock-in or later expenses will outweigh the donated services, they won't pick it. These organizations aren't populated by idiots, and Microsoft makes the terms of their deals clear before any contracts are entered. There's no coercion or trickery.
Second, when it comes to these sorts of discounts, Microsoft is late to the party. AWS gives free stuff to schools and non-profits. Apple has education discounts. People would be outraged if these companies ended these discounts. Yet people are outraged at Microsoft for offering similar discounts. You can't have it both ways.
Third, I seriously doubt that Microsoft is doing this as a purely cynical, profit-seeking move. I can't find any mention of a time limit on the free services. Not in Nadella's announcement. Not in responses to Q&A. Nowhere. There's also the fact that, for the past couple of years, Microsoft has been giving Office 365 away to non-profits and schools. Once they validate your organization (to make sure you're not trying to scam them), they give it away, for free, forever. What's the ulterior motive there? That people might use it, like it, and pay for it at home or at a different job? That's completely unobjectionable.
One last point: People like to accuse companies of predatory discounts, but nobody brings up the opposite. What about the countless free-loaders who use as much of a service as they can without paying, then move on to something else? I've seen people brag about using free servers from Rackspace, AWS, and Azure, with no intention of paying those companies a cent. As soon as the discount runs out, they move on. There is little condemnation of these tactics. If anything, many social circles celebrate them. This is a clear double-standard.
1. http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...
That's well put and explains the furor over Bill Gates' charity work while other immensely rich folks get zero heat for essentially hoarding their wealth like Scrooge McDuck instead.
Microsoft "charity" however will allways be suspicious because how ridiculosly backhanded they were during their era of monopoly. Whether its justified or not remains to be seen.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2457760
"arguably more bad than good being done"
I don't think there is any substantial negativity associated with Gate's charity work. The closest you'll find is some in the educational space who don't agree with the metrics his foundation uses to measure progress.
I'll comment on only one of your points, though:
> Microsoft is giving away a billion dollars worth of services,
> yet people are criticizing them for it.
2. The billion dollars is a retail value -- and the retail pricing is defined by Microsoft. I know these kinds of announcements (from everyone) always use retail value, but it's a disingenuous way of determining actual value.
If you donate a milion dollars for disaster relief do you think people should care if you are going to deduct it from your taxable revenue or not?
(b) Your analogy isn't actually analogous. If I take a rock from my back yard and attach a price tag of "ten trillion USD" to it, and then donate it to you, would you accept my claim that I donated assets worth ten trillion USD to you? A price that has only been declared by the seller says nothing about the value of the thing the price is attached to. Only a price at which a transaction happened says anything about the value--that is, a price at which someone actually bought what you offered. Now, if they are giving something away for free, that transaction arguably indicates that the value is zero USD.
For tax purposes yes I'm not an accountant but MSFT isn't doing this for a tax break and they'll get credit for the actual financial value of their donation based most likely on their operational costs.
>Your analogy isn't actually analogous. If I take a rock from my back yard and attach a price tag of "ten trillion USD" to it, and then donate it to you, would you accept my claim that I donated assets worth ten trillion USD to you?
My analogy was pretty much correct this isn't an sole actor attributing an arbitrary price, Azure pricing is set by the market not by MSFT. You can assign a defined discrete value for each "resource credit" for Azure, AWS, DigitalOcean, any other IAAS/PAAS service provider out there based on it's market price as these are defacto commodity resources.
If you give me a rock which is worth a trillion dollars by your account its really not the same thing unless the market agrees that this rock is worth a trillion dollars either in direct value (e.g. you can sell/buy a rock for that sum) or indirect value (e.g. the amount of resources I would need to spend to find a substitute rock).
(a) You were talking abstractly about "donations", not about Microsoft, (b) no, not for tax purposes. If you give someone a million dollars and then are reimbursed, say, a quarter of that by someone else, it's simply dishonest to publicly claim that you donated a million dollars, as (ba) your assets have only decreased by 750000 USD due to the donation, and (bb) because you are taking credit for the quarter million that that other person/entity paid for.
> My analogy was pretty much correct this isn't an sole actor attributing an arbitrary price, Azure pricing is set by the market not by MSFT. You can assign a defined discrete value for each "resource credit" for Azure, AWS, DigitalOcean, any other IAAS/PAAS service provider out there based on it's market price as these are defacto commodity resources.
Except that you choose to simply ignore one giant transaction in this market that happened only once they selectively reduced the price to zero (or rather, might happen, if people don't still consider that to be too expensive). If they were giving away a hundred dollars worth of services, sure, I'd be willing to accept that as a reasonable method of valuating the donation, but if it's in the same order of magnitude as their total yearly revenue in this area, not so much.
Also, it's actually not quite as much a commodity as you make it out to be, because of proprietary interfaces--the different providers certainly are in competition to one another, but one's product is not necessarily a direct substitute for the other's.
> If you give me a rock which is worth a trillion dollars by your account its really not the same thing unless the market agrees that this rock is worth a trillion dollars either in direct value (e.g. you can sell/buy a rock for that sum) or indirect value (e.g. the amount of resources I would need to spend to find a substitute rock).
A better measure in this case would be how much you could get others to buy it from you for. If your rock massively increases the supply of rocks, that is going to considerably drop the price.
I'm not sure you understand how tax deductions work.
Donating to charity allows you to claim a portion of that donation as a deductible, this can vary depending circumstances but in most cases you have a limit for the deductibles for gross income and the amount it self is usually not deducted in full regardless of limits when it comes to non-cash property (this is also gets more complicated because you have carrybacks, other losses, expenses etc.).
When Microsoft donates X amount of what ever to some one no one pays MSFT that money back, they might get some tax relief for it that's all this doesn't mean that you as an individual lose money in fact direct donation in many cases is more efficient than indirect funding through taxation.
>Except that you choose to simply ignore one giant transaction in this market that happened only once they selectively reduced the price to zero (or rather, might happen, if people don't still consider that to be too expensive). If they were giving away a hundred dollars worth of services, sure, I'd be willing to accept that as a reasonable method of valuating the donation, but if it's in the same order of magnitude as their total yearly revenue in this area, not so much.
It doesn't affect the price of the service in any way regardless of what portion of the global XAAS market or MSFT's own XAAS business it is. This simply allows for organizations that would not afford access to these resources at this scale before to have the opportunity to do so. It's also spread across 3 years and includes all MSFT cloud services so Office 365, Skype for Business/Lync, OneDrive etc. which makes is about 1/8th of their currently yearly revenue from cloud products which means overall it's about 1/24th of it's yearly cloud related revenue over the duration of the program.
>because of proprietary interfaces--the different providers certainly are in competition to one another, but one's product is not necessarily a direct substitute for the other's.
This holds true even if you build your infrastructure and platform in house it's not like MSFT can donate universal credits
>A better measure in this case would be how much you could get others to buy it from you for. If your rock massively increases the supply of rocks, that is going to considerably drop the price.
I am a non-profit or a school I don't sell rocks but I do need one, not everyone operates a tradable commodity exchange... You don't value the price of donated food at the local homeless soup kitchen by how much you could sell it to some one on the street you value it based on how much you will have to pay to make it on your own. And the people who actually receive the food tend to value it based on how hungry they are....
I am not sure you understand how accounting works. You have a tax liability. Now, you donate a million dollars (let's assume money for the sake of simplicity). How is this donation reflected in your balance sheet? Well, your bank owes you a million dollars less, and at the same time, you owe the state 250000 dollars (or whatever it is) less. Now, if the fact that your bank owes you a million dollars less means that you paid the donation, then the fact that you owe the state 250000 dollars less also means that the state has paid you a quarter of a million dollars of your donation back. Or in other words: That part of the donation is paid for by other tax payers.
> It doesn't affect the price of the service in any way regardless of what portion of the global XAAS market or MSFT's own XAAS business it is.
You have it all backwards. This is not about whether the donation changes the price in other sales of the same service. This is about how you determine what the price of a product is. You determine the price by figuring out what people are paying for the product. Now, when you do this, you simply discard one giant transaction that happens in this market, for no good reason. This giant transaction happens to be one where the price is zero.
> This holds true even if you build your infrastructure and platform in house it's not like MSFT can donate universal credits
(a) How does that change the fact that it's not a commodity?
(b) Actually, they could. People commonly call this "universal credit" "money".
> You don't value the price of donated food at the local homeless soup kitchen by how much you could sell it to some one on the street you value it based on how much you will have to pay to make it on your own. And the people who actually receive the food tend to value it based on how hungry they are....
Which should all result in the same value, unless you are making a mistake.
If you donate money you donate actual money, the deductibles are for potential profits from your revenue.
Say I donated 1M to charity these 1M are gone they aren't mine any more, this means that my buying power has been reduced by at least 1M and considering credit even more, and I've just lost any potential ROI on that money. What I can potentially get in return is the ability to deduct some of that amount from my tax future tax liability this means that if I make enough money to pay tax I could deduct a portion of the tax I would have to pay based on that donation.
No one in this scenario gave me money, I've gave out 1M, I might get some of it back however this isn't additional money that the tax payer has to pay that just money that is gone from the tax system.
By this logic a company that operates at an operational loss or an individual that their assets have resulted in a capital loss some how increase your tax liability which is simply not the case.
Now you might say that if people lose money all the time and not pay taxes eventually the Government will have to balance it out by taxing you more but this doesn't really happen that often as organization will not exist in operational loss which defers any tax liability on their account indefinitely same goes for people which their assets continuously lose value.
And while you might say but hold on a second Charity allows you to get some tax deduction and you can do that indefinitely well no no amount of charity will cancel out your tax liability, the cap ensures that the amount which can be deducted will always be considerably.
But you also need to remember that charity means that money goes to causes that in most cases would be funded by public funds (with Religious institutions being the only exception in some countries) this means that if you donate 1M and get 250K in deductibles the banks owes you 1M less, you have much less credit, you owe the state 250K less potentially but the state just got 1M in surplus because it doesn't need to allocate funding.
Charity (when people actually donate money, goods or labor) in most cases works exceptionally well when you actually donate to decent causes and not to some Kony2012 BS (and before you complain about remember that to pass the budget they US government ends up spending 100's of millions on nonsense like investigating the effects of beavers on moose mating calls and the economical implication of anti trust investigations against ice cream cartels in Guatemala on US foreign interests) to the point where some countries either do not put caps on charitable donations or are looking into removing them.
You need to understand that charity isn't a tax loop hole even with 100% deductible. If I earned 2M paid 50% of that in taxes in a given year (n) I now have 1M$, if I donate all of that to charity the government has technically received 2M from me instead of 1M as it now doesn't have to pay out additional 1M to fund various project because I have done so in their place.
Not only that but technically depending on what I've donated too I've actually increased their tax revenue potentially even more since some of my donation could end up paying for goods (VAT/Sales tax), salaries, microloans for businesses etc, housing (deed stamp tax (not sure if you have that in the US) etc.
Now I'm out of 1M$ and i get it as a deductible and I carryback this deductible to the next year to get my money back I need to make just as much as I did last year while paying no taxes, so if I make 2M again I will have 2M which is exactly the amount of money I would've have if i donated 0 to charity and paid the full tax for each year (if i do not donate to charity I could potentially have more money from capital gains).
This is pretty much the definition of a zero sum game or well to more accurately put it equivalency - Charity is pretty much paying more "taxes" if your deductibles are capped (especially at a percentage rather than a flat sum) or extending credit / giving a tax free loan to society if you can deduct the full amount (given you can make sufficient revenue or carryback the deductible over subsequent years).
There is no case in which when Money Inc LLC or Richie Rich give 1M to charity Johnny Bluecollar ends up paying more tax to in order to cover for them.
The correctness of this statement depends on the correctness of the valuation you are quoting. If you interpret the critics correctly, they are saying that the long-term costs might outweigh the short-term benefits of this "donation". If that is the case, the donation's rational valuation wouldn't be a billion dollars, as claimed by Microsoft, but actually negative. If you accordingly rephrase your argument using some negative valuation, so as to mirror the position that you are apparently trying to argue against, you might notice that it's not a sensible argument at all.
If one were to stick to IaaS, using only Azure hosted Linux VMs and not get involved in any special Azure PaaS offerings, then any project hosted under this model could easily avoid platform lock in and be transported to another service provider at any time.
A $200M donation?
How's that? Am I missing something?
I can think of lots of ways the cloud can help.
Yeah
I know the Univeristy of Wisconsin used to roll its own email, but recently started using Outlook acounts for everything and I'm definitely not a fan. Migration was painful or it at least seemed so. If orgs are able to isolate their architecture from the cloud and services, it might work out. Unfortunately, a lot of companies and organizations treat aggregate privacy like a preference instead of a requirement. Bartering chips.
My cynicism may be unfounded, but a company by the same name helped write the book on fostering lock-in not too long ago.
[0] http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/3/9662414/microsoft-reduces-...