[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.
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...
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.
I remain skeptical that MS has changed its basic playbook.
P.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
Now it's just adapted for remotely-hosted software.
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:
edit: http://highscalability.com/stack-overflow-architecture
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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...
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?
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.
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.
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-...