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.
