(preferably the open computing rack spec or maybe something entirely different and more suitably designed. This area is ripe for patents and I'm looking for like minds to establish some prior art in anticipation of bad actors especially the mostly unprofitable energy utilities, and I've legal and development budget carved out of my savings to do so on my hunch I can reasonably ask to be made whole if the product is useful)
* slightly involved investigation showed me I can assemble the most excellent home theater system from pro equipment for plenty less than close to the higher end of consumer systems, while giving my family the facility almost every way equal to a professional post production studio. This isn't Lutron. Lutron don't sell DANTE routing/ volume controls and switching with display to fit into our light switch soffets. But Teac do for a modest sum. DANTE is the most advanced pro audio live audio interface over Ethernet so we'll be able to connect our daughters keyboard music workstation to the DAC in our den, which can record 32 channels of 5Mhz sample sound to SD card, or have a computer patched in by a inexpensive Yamaha PCIe (v4!) card capable of incredible wonders and software process for Dolby and Auro3D (a lesser known but arguably far better surround format originally adopted by Skywalker and big studios and now part of the IMAX 8K spec. This is software processing and we can record as easily as play. We aimed to beat a dealerships quote for a "safely not high end but show off what's possible today not tomorrow please " setup and managed by a pleasant amount.
.... all I have written looks like prime Azure/IoT candidate income sources to my vision of the not distant future. Of course Microsoft is bold. How can you be anything but hold at trillion dollars scales? How can you move the needle unless you're playing with a big stack? I amuse myself with thoughts about splitting Microsoft's businesses now and separating cloud from on premises lines. This makes sense to me as a business decision that would help the company to thrive whilst enabling the less connected economic world to access software systems that aren't subsidies for the cloud computing competition. I think Azure is a better standalone business than integrated. This may require a long term investment from shareholders. But our 401ks need genuine growth stocks. The legacy business will serve the world being served by the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation today. That's a sympathy for the good in every way possible that I've thought about it. I would separate the IP and patent portfolio into a trust in recognition of Microsoft business in the OSS world which needs assurance and support but by separating the on premise Microsoft from Azure, the on prem Microsoft can now compete with open source alternatives. Equally this is the open source movements greatest opportunity for all time. Who cares about the Year Of Desktop Linux if Microsoft is abandoning the desktop? We won already. So did Microsoft. Pooh, capitalism is about growing pies for real? Hand me my defibrillator!
My company partnership numbered five in the beginning.
This isn't a unusual headcount for a family home that's represented by a ad hoc bunch of pcs, phones, printers, and possibly a consumer NAS in the most prominent form likely a cable box or network movie disc player.
No Active Directory licences involved here.
But why not?
My brother is a retired professor of transportation sciences and setting Windows Update is not a use of time he'll entertain. I think he just isn't aware that he's not enjoying his new SSD storage how he should. Startup time is 5KRPM SATA quick for his main machine.
I am going to provide a Microsoft 365 account and licenses for him from allocation for ad hoc consultants to work on their own personal laptops but our operating system image and our network not touching anything about their environment at all.
However I'm positive I can provide very close to the same by simply buying a Office 365 Premium CAL from the local pc world store. This won't include any cloud W10 license not the virtual machine runtime and asynchronous mirroring for a DR facility and neither is the extensive endpoint security system included that's a real selling point now iPhone and iPad and Linux are to be supported sny day now.
But just roll out the sum of the above for a "family office" license (includes one academic license without further application) for say $50pcm .
I know that I am going to sell countless such hypothetical licenses if they made available to retail. Upgrade payments get you the virtual machine runtimes, storage lakes and archives, mail order Microsoft hardware tokens/2FA sold under Xbox xtranet branding (I could think of better but I could also register and sell a good name too) which is something that I cannot wait for giving the kids to secure their phones and laptops at school because they will accept the device and not reject it because they will need it to log in to their games after school as well and they will be able to signal their achievements with flare and graphics emblazons on their keys and their parents are going to be able to secure the kids against forced access by ovrrreaching school administrators (who did so to our wrath on unfounded allegations of cheating last semester) because we'll be able to require no line zone simultaneous authorisation by one of us via another channel and assuming we paid for content security we'll be able to prevent copying and searching by anyone we don't wish to all the while nobody can accuse the girls of withholding their passwords and I best not start on the enforceability of contractual allowance for such invasions upon minors whilst parents guardians nor anybody's got any legal rights to bind a minor to such impositions as far as our counsel advised...
This is easy a couple of hundred of millions of "small business " Azure/Intune sites to connect and the arguments are wholly relevant to our immediate lives and very strongly represented by many other means without any advertising to us at all.
Microsoft is to our knowledge the sole major cloud computing business who spends real money to deflect warrant less and unlawful ingress into accounts by LEOs. Apple appears to be protective of customers whenever it protects Apple. This notwithstanding, the Santander case being the one to watch, iPhone or rather the now almost usable iPad OS, after gaining Microsoft endpoint security (another paid upgrade to reach the magical $75pcm mark equal to LinkedIn and far more than a office license costs in real world pricing) that's what this is about.
This is a theoretical two hundred billion dollars in revenue coming on stream in effect possible any time Nadella is up for it.
How to handle this network load?
That's why David Cutler was pulled from retirement to bootstrap Windows on the Xbox and why they're selling serious workstation class hardware for peanuts in the guise of a gaming console.