Microsoft earnings blow past estimates in every category, beats Street

God damn Azure performance is SO bad sometimes. I don't think they have the level of monitoring needed to clean up "bad neighbors" on shared servers. I've seen 2x performance increases by simply deleting a virtual machine and recreating it so it gets placed on a different box.

GCE/GCP is really interesting, though I haven't had the opportunity to use it.

I've said it a few times, but I'd LOVE to see a latency graph/map of the major cloud providers and latency/throughput to eachother's different data centers. This way when you have some services/data in one, and want to do something in another, you have an idea of what the cost in terms of time will be.

ex: Compute/service/docker nodes in DO/Linode via Docker Cloud to manage the clusters, and use data services from azure/aws/gce. I mean, yes it's better to do in the same house/cloud, but for a hobby project where you'd like some redundancy 3x$20 nodes in DO + Azure SQL/Tables or AWS RDS/Aurora. So you don't have to manage your databases, but can save on the service nodes over EC2 or Azure VMs.

But I probably won't try it because GCE/GCP is a distraction for Google rather than a core business, and I don't wanna do the migration again in two years when they drop it.

This isn't marketing, it's trust. Trust that Google has repeatedly spunked up the wall with other products. It will take them years to unfuck that with companies that don't need the latest and shiniest.

Do you know if LibreOffice modifies csv files in this manner, or is it 'safe' ?

What happens if you mark the file read-only?

I've never had that happen and I open a lot of CSVs in Excel.

I don't doubt it, but the bit about excel was sarcasm, it doesn't exist in our workflow.

You misinterpreted iaw's response. Its an analogy that Azure is IBM for the cloud.

You and <cool SV startup> don't register that on the radar. But the random Fortune 500 big corp is pouring money into "Enterprise Clouds" like Oracle, IBM and SAP with embedded sales, consulting and support.

They are extremely relevant. They are one of the largest tech consulting firms in the world, which makes pushing their products (like enterprise cloud) on businesses a lot easier.

IBM's blueBiz has a generous free plan that is adequate for running a couple web apps. Haven;t used them in a while, but a good platform, especially if your side projects fit in the free plan.

Completely true, and deliciously ironic

And still, they cannot compete with AWS in terms of "completeness of vision" how Gartner puts it. And that is totally justified.

This still doesn't change the fact Google is a terrible company to do business with unless you have exponential spend year over year. The comment above about low touch is spot on.

Story of Google. See Play Music.

We've been on Google Cloud for a year and recently moved everything to AWS.

On paper, Google Cloud looks great. Pricing is definitely better but raw VM performance is not. You get what you pay for. Stability is not anywhere near AWS. Had multi region load balancer outages. VMs going half the performance suddenly, out of nowhere. Support is non existent or much more expensive than AWS.

We were happy with it for a while but I'd not suggest it for anything critical anymore.

unfortunately, if you run a business, you really want someone to answer your questions on phone/email whenever required.

If you are not a technology company, the value of your very few good tech people's time tends to outweigh technology expenses and you can't attract a lot of top notch ops people anyway because you can't promise them an exciting careers.

Remember that bulk of the fortune 500 is not tech. So you want to pay that support expense and get your people all the help they need. Whoever has a good track record of providing that help gets the business.

In general, I would say marketing is the thing Google does the best, which is why I find it surprising they are unable to market these products.

Their entire business proposition revolves around getting products and services in front of exactly the people looking to spend money on those things. They were able to market Chrome super effectively, taking a lot of share from IE. Chromebooks and their flagship phones get lots of attention.

So why can't they get the message of GCP in front of the most likely customers?

I too love GCP and have used it a bunch and really recommend it but I get the same reactions. Not sure what Google can do at this point.

I used GCP successfully on a big project for Nike.

Went to use it again for another client, and mid-development, they froze the account with no way to recover it.

Well, my Nike job was for a live event. Had it gotten shutdown the same way, I would have been fucked. Holy shit even the thought of that happening scares the shit out of me—this was a multi-million dollars live event!

That killed GCP for me permanently. Same CRAP Google support they always have, but now with the ability to do serious damage to my reputation. Never. Again.

Depends on the specific service. Some are priced a % above cost (S3), others are priced a % below competition (data transfer), others are priced based on value (ML, text-to-speech, etc.).

If you have $200k/£100k people who know how to handle it, yes.

There's no strict definition of what "commodity" pricing is. The market is competitive and the products are roughly comparable to each other, so it's reasonable to call them "commodity" products.

Agree that Azure AD is the magic key to get more businesses to adopt MS cloud solutions. I'm also seeing a lot of large businesses covering their bases by using Azure for Corp IT and dev/test environments, but set up production with AWS instances. Of course, this is only when they're used in a Infrastructure-as-a-Service setup, not if their apps consume platform-specific services. In addition, services like SCCM Cloud Gateway (for managing and patching remote users) only work through Azure.

No doubt MS will continue to grow in this space, since it offers stability, support when things go south, as well as easy onboarding with various developer focused initiatives. While the variety of services doesn't match the AWS catalogue yet, they also offer a marketplace where 3rd party services can be purchased and integrated.

> Google Cloud provides fully built solutions for majority of use cases.

That is not my experience. In fact, you just need to look at the Google Cloud documentation solution use cases. For example: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/mobile/mobile-gaming-anal... (chosen more or less at random).

You need:

* Cloud pub/sub * Cloud dataflow * Big Query * Cloud datalab

They don't stitch all that together for you. Nor do they have a good way of calculating how much each of those services will cost when used in conjunction with each other.

Ironically, that's the way that Microsoft used to operate. They were very big on providing the platform and API, then insisting that partners built the solutions. That was back in the Gates and Ballmer era.

I guess that they've learned from that major mistake.

I have a perfect example for how little Google understands Enterprise.

This issue[1] affects almost every enterprise developer using this product (the original AppEngine) and has been open since 2008 (Nearly 10 years!).

I provided a (awful!) work around in 2010[2] for the Java version, and there are similarly dreadful hacks for the Python version. It would be trivial for Google to implement one of these fixes.

Google just doesn't care at all.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=5...

[2] https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=5...

You can't do it at low cost though, selling to enterprises is demanding in terms of resources, you can't afford to sell to them unless you are making a ton of money out of each sale.

One of Joel Spolsky's better articles[1] talks about this.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

Enterprise customers are also vastly more sticky and vastly less price-conscious than a consumer/retail customer. I completely agree about the sales cycle part, but it's amazing how locked-in enterprise customers will allow themselves to be.

> But that kind of mindset is completely foreign to Google's culture. If you won't tolerate crummy hacks in your internal engineering

I imagine you don't have experience doing Android development.

> It's why enterprises get solutions which, again and again, are unperformant, don't meet their actual needs, deliver poor satisfaction ...

This is a caricature that I would also have believed until I was involved in it. It's the vision of some lumbering dinosaur stumbling to it's death, bloated with age and cranky. There is definitely some truth to it but like all caricatures that truth is greatly exaggerated.

The reality is a lot more subtle. In many cases it is decades of institutional experience that creates a deep conservatism.

> [...] Microsoft can make a ton of money selling some of these hacks to enterprises

I think this is the negative way to view it and again the reality is different. The conservatism is the opposite than what you think. If I say "we need to stitch together these base systems ..." the questions I get are "How to do we monitor the integrations? Who gets called at 4am when something downstream goes down? Who ensures those integrations are kept up-to-date over the lifetime of the project? What are the ongoing maintenance tasks and who does them?" etc. They are in fact trying to overprotect themselves against hack solutions since these systems may live decades.

All of those questions have answers of course, but they are additional pieces of planning and infrastructure that we have to bring to the table. They are also questions that must be answered before we even consider beginning a project.

So I think it is more fair to see Microsoft not as "selling hacks" but more as being a patient guide through all of the peculiar institutional conservatisms. They speak the right language and take the time to understand the concerns of the managers.

Additionally, it is extremely frustrating working with enterprises neck deep in technical debt located in the middle of nowhere oftentimes with really poor technical and organizational maturity teams trying to move into the cloud... in 2017. I've been doing the raindance of cloud migrations since 2009 and it's almost a net negative career path because instead of working on relatively new technology and concepts 60%+ of the time, you spend a lot of time working on long-outdated versions of everything, especially stacks that are in oversupply of labor or are so obscure you can't hire anymore (not a lot of Delphi folks out there despite its merits, sadly). So now to compete with peers not dealing with legacy as their literal job, I have to spend another 20+ hours / week to stay current with people who might actually work on somewhat modernized / greenfield systems that are just doing a 9-to-5 job and get paid maybe within a 15% gap. This is not the same thing as Javascript framework fatigue despite sounding like there's similar mechanics.

Vulkan works fine on Windows of course, the GPU makers handled it themselves instead.

Depends on how you define need. If you want to have a common open standard - absolutely. Same as with HTML instead of some ActiveX abomination. But if you want to have balkanized lock-in mess, then it's a different story.

As long as MS has the notion of lock-in going on, I don't buy this whole "reformed" MS story.

Other lock-in freaks aren't an excuse for being one. Apple and Sony also didn't try to claim they are "new".

4) new charging mechanism that isn't compatible with the macbook

I know this is said a lot, but who are the users asking for cheaper phones? Here on HN, where presumably most people are technologically inclined, the sentiment is "I'll take a bigger phone for large battery life." But all phone manufacturers are going the opposite. Are regular users asking for smaller phones? There must be a user group that wants it smaller and smaller (actually just thinner).