Yea the smart play Microsoft is making is to go to businesses and say "look you could go with us or AWS.. AWS essentially says "good luck you're on your own" and we will hold your hand and our premier support people will come to your business and set it all up for you and show your like 2 IT guys how to manage things.. They will make a ton of money on cloud because a huge amount of businesses are basically lagging behind the rest of the industry with cloud adoption and getting rid of their old servers and hosting services.
I work in an enterprise place and we discuss this frequently. Even worse than AWS is Google, they just don't get the fact that Technical Managers at big enterprise places want hand-hold turn-key solutions. The amount of money they leave on the table is mind-bending.
You go to Google and say "We need to do X" and they say "Here is product Y that connects to product Z, but you need to write your own connector." And each product has it's own pricing structure (one by CPU usage, one with flat fees, one based on throughput) so working out total cost is a nightmare. Then you have to hire around those techs, project manage the build of the infrastructure, etc. At that point you start to ask "Why are we using them again?"
I've heard "Amazon and Google don't understand enterprise" at least a dozen times in the last couple of months. You don't hear that about Microsoft. Coming from a startup/open source/indie background I thought AWS and Google would be eating the world but at least in enterprise they appear to be missing a big opportunity.
> "We need to do X" and they say "Here is product Y that connects to product Z, but you need to write your own connector." And each product has it's own pricing structure (one by CPU usage, one with flat fees, one based on throughput) so working out total cost is a nightmare. Then you have to hire around those techs, project manage the build of the infrastructure, etc. At that point you start to ask "Why are we using them again?"
This is a feature(?) of AWS. Google Cloud provides fully built solutions for majority of use cases. AWS provides nuts and bolts and tell you to integrate them.
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.
If you want a customizable solution, you connect the tools. Pub/Sub for streaming, Dataflow for processing data, Big Query for Data Analytics (Warehousing), Datalab is your development environment. Its hard for a single solution to serve 100% of customer needs. That why they suggest tools. Care to share what a better technology stack looks like? I would love to know if there are better alternatives for services like Google App Engine, Google Cloud Load Balancer, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, TensorFlow Cloud ML, Container Engine (Kubernetes), Stack Driver, ...
Speaking about cost, its all flat rate, with usage discounts (the more you use, the more discount you get) and there are no upfront payments / reservations / locking / hourly billings (like AWS)
> If you are looking for a solution for mobile analytics
I'm not at all, that example was pulled at random as an example.
> Its hard for a single solution to serve 100% of customer needs. That why they suggest tools.
It would be hard to describe just how custom of a solution my company would need. My company certainly likes to do things in a unique way. However there is a huge grey area between "here is a specific product that doesn't quite fit your needs" and "here are the blocks you need to build a custom solution on your own". That grey area is filled with money.
> I would love to know if there are better alternatives for services like ...
Don't underestimate the ability of large enterprise to roll their own. It isn't like Google is the only company that can build a message queue or a load balancer. Nor are they the only game in town selling them. This is a time to remember: The customer is always right. You and I may think that "Google is the best" but my manager wants what my manager wants. We may select a lesser solution simply because the support is significantly better. And that support should be vertically integrated. If we have support for pub sub, support for big query but not support for the integration between them ... that is a drawback.
> Speaking about cost, its all flat rate
Not really. For example data flow is based on the size of machine you are running (plus some extra percentage for the service), pub sub is based on number of events, big query is based on query time + egress, etc. I probably still have the spreadsheet I used to try to get a handle on costs kicking around somewhere. "Flat rate" does not describe the monstrosity that is that spreadsheet.
I totally understand that some people don't understand the enterprise mentality. I'm not trying to defend it - maybe just give a small view into it. Now that I live in it, I may not agree with it, but I understand it. Google doesn't.
> I'm not at all, that example was pulled at random as an example.
Then give me an example of what you are looking for and I will give you a solution
> My company certainly likes to do things in a unique way.
And every company has a unique way of doing things. That is why they provided all the tools you want and let you combine them to fit your custom needs. Instead, if they were to provide turnkey solutions, you would not use them because you have unique needs.
> It isn't like Google is the only company that can build a message queue or a load balancer. Nor are they the only game in town selling them.
If there are any better solutions, please let me know. Support is first class on Google Cloud. That is one of the reasons why Spotify choose Google Cloud over AWS.
> "Flat rate" does not describe the monstrosity that is that spreadsheet.
Google Cloud pricing structure is far easier to work with, as you don't need reservations/upfront payments and at the same time leaves room for scaling up and down elastically. The amount you pay is simply based on usage. For Pub/Sub its the number of messages, for BigQuery its the amount of data that is queried. I would love to see a simpler pricing structure. Would you care to share the details if you know of any?
A simpler pricing structure would be an Enterprise flat rate. Charge five to ten times what any possible scaling might cause. There are corporations that will pay. That's the point about "mind-bending".
Now that I live in it, I may not agree with it, but I understand it. Google doesn't.
I love the hubris of statements like this. Google makes decisions based on many factors, many of which you have no idea about. The idea that they're leaving an incredible amount of money on the table because they just lack all your enterprise experience is ludicrous.
> because they just lack all your enterprise experience
I can only speak to the architectural projects I have been involved with and to the general attitude around the office. I could rephrase my last statement as: "The general impression from the technical managers at my workplace is that Google does not demonstrate understanding of the factors that influence the types of large enterprise purchases we routinely make".
I might suggest you are mistaking my description of the inner-workings of my workplace with a value judgement, or with my own technical assessment of Google's technology. What you need to understand is that it is people like me pitching Google Cloud and witnessing it getting shot down. I'm trying to explain to you why.
What you need to understand is that it is people like me pitching Google Cloud and witnessing it getting shot down
And you feel you have sufficient understanding of all the tradeoffs involved in Google choosing to implement what you want them to implement in the way you want them to implement it? You know enough about their overall Cloud strategy, their future development plans, their staffing situation, etc?
Because it sounds like you're saying, "I have some money I'm willing to pay. Google won't take it, Google just doesn't understand!"
There are lots of jobs you could offer me that I would turn down for a variety of reasons.
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.
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.
And this is why the enterprise sector is so terrible. Everyone thinks that magic genies come out of lamps, if only you rub the lamp with enough money. It's why enterprises get solutions which, again and again, are unperformant, don't meet their actual needs, deliver poor satisfaction, and eventually end up costing the company in reputation and business in the long run.
You can't take hand-configured and hand-tuned monolithic systems and load them into the cloud, not anymore than you could take mainframe code and write a nice C wrapper for it. Sure, there are all kinds of hacks, but then, what you're really doing is selling marketing to the shareholders, not meaningfully improving the underlying engineering.
Of course Microsoft can make a ton of money selling some of these hacks to enterprises. After all, the customer is always right. But that kind of mindset is completely foreign to Google's culture. If you won't tolerate crummy hacks in your internal engineering, why would you sell a crummy hack to your customers?
> 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.
But that's exactly what Google's Customer Reliability Engineering addresses. CRE says to the enterprise customer, if you're willing to bring your software up to Google's standards, then the guy answering the 4am call when downstream screws up will be some of those same engineers who give Google its legendary reliability, and not one of the enterprise's engineers with little experience on GCP.
Those standards are the difference between a hack backed up by sales engineers and "premier support" and a tech manager who never finds out that anything was amiss because all the failovers just worked.
Technical Managers at big enterprise places want hand-hold turn-key solutions.
Ding-ding-ding-ding! Now, if you can do this at a lower price point than the competition (i.e. through real technical innovation and without giving in to the temptation to charge your customers out the wazoo, because it's funny money to them, and they are uncertain and afraid) you will prosper!
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.
Enterprise customers are fussy and involve a painful sales cycle. If I were in a position to choose, I'd always favor a consumer/retail market for commodity infrastructure services.
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.
Maybe that is a strength, selling low cost solutions in volume is completely different to high margin enterprise sales.
I'm pretty sure you can't excel at both, you need to decide what you are and it seems clear to me Amazon and Google are both in the first segment and Microsoft is heading (retreating?) towards the second.
This is serving a large, and legitimate growing need in the market too. Not everyone can hire "Super DevOps Puppet, Ansible, Master" employees.
AWS is going for pure volume.
MSFT is going for customer service and "enterprise ready" (HIPAA, gov't, etc)
GCP is a bit in no-man's land. Diane Greene appears to be heading it towards Azure, but it's very un-Google-like. (Google likes high margin businesses that can be support by technology solutions, not people)
Google Cloud is half the price, double the performances, and it has many major products/capabilities that are light years ahead and have zero equivalents in the other clouds.
They're the unexpected player and they suck at marketing though :D
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.
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.
Support is actually quite existent (/me waves), including for free tier customers. However, in line with our esteemed competitors, you do need to sign up to a paid plan if you need an SLA on responses: https://cloud.google.com/support/
If you have a specific example of GCP support not working well for you, please drop me a line at jani at google dot com and I'll be happy to look into it.
> If you have a specific example of GCP support not working well for you, please drop me a line at jani at google dot com and I'll be happy to look into it.
Unfortunately you just described why people won't prefer GCP. With your competitor, AWS, people actually get a support but with GCP, they don't get anyone unless they complain on reddit, hacker news, twitter etc. and hoping that one of GCP employees may come across to their issue and they'd get some support. No sane company would invest into this.
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 think there's a consumer vs. enterprise gap there. Chrome, Android, Chromebook, Docs/Drive (originally), etc. are all consumer products and gained traction in that space. Marketing to enterprises for something like GCP is quite a bit different and requires a different strategy that Google just hasn't really mastered yet.
I worked with both Google Cloud and AWS. Having read Gartners Magic Quadrants on Cloud, I really question Gartners competency on understanding what Cloud really means. There is no question that Google Cloud is years ahead of AWS (ease of use, scalability, performance, vertical integration, networks, security ... ), but Gartner reports that AWS is leader. Bottomline: Don't trust what others say. Try out various cloud providers and decide for yourself, before diving head down and suffering with pain everyday.
That MQ is led by Lydia Leong who is probably the most respected analyst in cloud (dating back to 2008!)... they're pretty transparent in the actual paid report.
AWS Lambda has a major head start and is a big reason for its head of vision above Google. Don't get me wrong, Google has a great quality cloud, but the pace and breadth of Amazon's offering is breathtaking.
One of the big controversies was IBM Softlayer being reduced to niche status, which led to howling of a volume never heard out of New York... which delayed the report months... but Gartner stuck to their guns. It's a pretty fair report.
I am AWS heavy and used Google Cloud a bit. There are tons of AWS services where Google just does not provide an equivalent. Also, AWS release pace is incredible.
Quality of Google Cloud is very decent though.
Google Cloud and AWS are pretty much equivalent in terms of feature parity: https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/docs/map-aws-google-clou.... There are few (10% os services maybe?) that are not available on other platform. Also, the way AWS counts service is by nuts and bolts (AWS believes in providing fundamental components, not higher level frameworks) vs Google Cloud counts things by Cars / Trains / Submarines levels. That why people tend to think that Google Cloud provides fewer services. (As an example, imagine how many number of AWS components are needed to perform the function of App Engine. May be 10?)
>> Having read Gartners Magic Quadrants on Cloud, I really question Gartners competency on understanding
I think you can replace "Cloud" with whatever technology Gartner or most analysts write about.
These firms are little more than uninformed hype producers that fuel the enterprise software spend cycle through marketing (webinars, "research", tap-my-back-events and 3k€ "reports") that tell CIOs/CTOs what they should already know, by definition of their function: what technologies to consider for their business problems, why and how.
On the other hand, they provide a nice scapegoat when someone needs to offload responsibility, a bit like the "no one ever got fired for buying recommended by Gartner".
PS: wish I could find Zed Shaw's video on "calling bullshit" (or related), as it includes a nice anecdote on dealing with industry analysts.
As someone who works with technology every day, i never have any idea what Gartner is trying to say. I look at their magic quadrants or whatever, and have no idea how it is supposed to make decisions about technologies or their vendors.
GCP's technology is way beyond everyone else's, but they lack a good story.
I keep recommending GCP to people, and they wrinkle their noses skeptically. Part of it is Google's reputation for bad support and for killing products; I have to tell them that while that rep is definitely extremely well deserved, GCP operates completely differently. Another part of it is not knowing what GCP is -- it's flying surprisingly low under many people's radar. Some people think it's just App Engine, which I get the impression that a lot of people got burnt by in the early days (apparently it's great now; never used it).
I think Google has a chance, but they need to work on their marketing. I don't know how they would fix the reputation problem, though, other than bide their time and hope that time heals all wounds.
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.
MS's chief economist believes that basic cloud services will be commodity-priced, so the strategy is to add value, and both tools and services will be key for that.
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.
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.).
Just licensing alone for office is enough to drive a high adoption... $10/month/user is easier to account for in a billing cycle than $200-300/computer every two years.. the cost is more consistent for businesses, and the revenue is more consistent for MS...
Likewise on Azure... Azure based ActiveDirectory, SQL as a service, and simpler deployments (compared to AWS) are a win... I've used Azure at a few positions, and am currently feeling like I'm pulling my hair out with AWS by comparison, just getting some simple deployment strategies. It feels like Azure strikes the "just right" experience better than aws. At least from my limited knowledge and experience.
Wait til you try GCE/GCP. It's so clean, smooth, fast, and cheap. The products so easy to work with.
Azure is great targeting for MS's Enterprise customers but I've had nothing but problems. Terrible perf, weird products, and that horrible UI that just causes pain. I know at least 2 companies that have significant Azure credits but instead pay for GCP because Azure was just so painful.
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.
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.
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.
I've had better luck with the azure twitter account than premier support.
Maybe I've just had bad luck, but in my (moderately limited) experience, premier support == guaranteed indian call center so they can meet the higher SLAs.
Actual conversation with premier support:
me: hey, it looks like the format of the billing report CSVs changed without any documentation or versioning. Can you confirm? Also, it looks like the line endings are now randomly intermixed between windows and linux style. Whats up with that?
support: STOP OPENING THE CSVs IN EXCEL, IT CAN CORRUPT FORMATTING.
me: good call, let me remove excel from our usage monitoring automation pipeline......sike..
Aside: I am convinced that EA billing/usage reports are manually generated via Mechanical Turk.
Excel's handling of CSV's pisses me off. It will modify the actual file when you open it, even if you don't save.
The entire office suite is horrible when it comes to preserving user data though. Access will change sql queries if you look at the code and close the query without saving or modifying anything. It's especially annoying when the query no longer works because Access 'helpfully' removed some parenthesis.
I don't think excel will change the file if you dont save.
But, weirdly excels CSV issues are a more mac-specific program. MSFT insists that mac has a different format for csvs and will constantly destroy csvs, change formatting, unquote fields, merge columns together, insert random unicode characters, screwed up line endings, etc if you save on mac and aren't careful.
I've actually noticed msft has changed the default csv output format in excel mac twice over the past month (including making the csv default format be TSV??) which is pretty ridiculous.
I just want them to comma seperate, quote fields if necessary, and properly escape characters. Don't insert random characters or fuck with encodings. How hard could it be?
Microsoft has embraced the start of a great 'bundling' phase as part of the market's often-repeated cycle of 'bundling and unbundling'. Seems like a smart strategy for their current situation. At some point in the future when the bundles become bloated, inefficient and/or lose product focus, new entrants will come and offer single-point 'unbundled' solutions as a means of further innovation.
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.
I work for one of those three. The amount of $1-$10 million contracts that come through for "enterprise cloud" software and services is amazing. For the division I work in, our usage is increasing upwards of 10% month over month. Maybe even faster, actually.
I assumed more people would know the history of IBM and how it maintained relevance through consulting work around it's enterprise products when it couldn't keep up with the PC market.
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.
AWS has a very good and mature support model and is very willing to work with businesses to make their offerings fit their needs. That combined with them having home field advantage will give Azure a long fight.
I'm not as confident about this. In my experience, there are many "legacy" businesses who have adopted something as simple as Azure Active Directory, migrating off of their on-prem solution.
Office 365 was, really, Microsoft's foot in the door to migrate people to Azure. Now, Azure AD is a foot in the door to other Azure services. And if Azure can come in and up-sell them on things like website and database hosting, with big support contracts to match, that's pretty huge.
AWS will continue to dominate among more modern businesses who have developers on staff. But I genuinely think Azure will see a lot of success servicing legacy customers who are used to the microsoft ecosystem and don't have m/any developers on staff.
All that being said; Personally: Azure is a pile of crap, with practically no redeeming qualities. I have no doubt it will do well with legacy businesses, but I really wish it wouldn't.
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.
This is amusing in light of the fact that Microsoft apparently has many internal services running on old Dells in conference rooms[1] because the red tape to move them to the cloud is too much.
It's a smart play, I personally know of about ~$30million dollars that is just sitting around getting dusty simply because greenlit projects can't find any more AWS experts to get them actually out there. Once you have everything set up and a team of experts watching videos all day it's great, but many teams just aren't gonna get there.
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.
This is actually the gap Rackspace is rebranding themselves to fill. They're now trying to sell their "fanatical support" brand, for whatever it's worth anymore, as expert guidance on top of AWS (and Azure). I think it was a pretty savvy move for them.
I'm still a fan of "innovator's dilemma" and "crossing the chasm". It's about customer tolerance to the new: if new technology can be used by the same customers in the same way, incumbents win. But if it requires change in customers (different customers or different ways), then entrants win (incumbents being captured by their customers).
Therefore, I'd have thought MS would lose here... unless they can make the cloud be used like desktop apps.
personally i find it interesting that..if i'm on my own, then i might as well be really on my own..own my own racks, servers, networking, mail, ldap, etc.. and tech like virtualisation and config management are making it easier than ever..
Nicely done Microsoft. Also interesting note in the earnings release[1] is this, "Search advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs increased 10% (up 11% in constant currency) driven by increased revenue per search and search volume." A collection of businesses that make up most of the revenue and search-advertising with strong growth year over year. What's not to like?
$5.2 billion in net income for the quarter. That competes very well with 2014, in which they had $22b in annualized net income. In 2011 for example, they generated $23b in net income, their highest profit.
The difference? Profits from the Windows division. It would be a context drop to ignore the change - one which they could do absolutely nothing about - when it comes to how people are buying and using computing today (PCs sales have fallen significantly from the peak). Nothing Microsoft could have done was going to stop PC sales from falling (a less disastrous Windows 8 would have slowed it some).
I'd argue they're in better shape today versus 2011, when their profit was slightly higher. Today's Microsft is far less vulnerable to the erosion in the PC market. For Microsoft to not be in the midst of collapsing with the down shift in the PC market, and the loss of importance for the PC as the former center of the computing universe, is a staggering accomplishment that few have managed in tech history.
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.
I don't get what you're trying to say. Vulkan needs nothing from MS it's purely a driver thing, as for MS using DX over it I guess Vulkan is far too new and DX is proven and something you control (I wouldn't bet my core platform tech on something done by a committee either, maybe once it's a defacto standard), meanwhile GL is garbage compared to it, talk a aout Balkanization, good luck writing dx11 level features that work across two GL drivers.
And you apparently represent those who profit from lock-in. Is that why you justify it all the time? Because no one would objectively do it. I never saw an engineer who said "lock-in is good, more lock-in please!". Those who do it, are backwards thinking managers like the one from this quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_...
No, I represente those that have real life experience in the industry, and don't care one little second about lock-in, because the industry learned to profit from it since the early 80's.
- game studios specializing in ports among hardware platforms
- consultants doing optimization work in specific APIs
- hardware platforms that offer an unique experience in terms of gameplay, due to their CPU and GPU architectures, that no portable 3D ever exposed, not even Vulkan (hence NVN on Switch)
- middleware engines that allow for portability, while providing access to all hardware features, with better debugging tools that so called portable APIs ever had
Your problema is that no one in the industry, the people that actually pay for tickets to attend GDC and similar conferences not weekend indie devs, don't see lock-in as a burden, rather as a way to make the game exclusive and sell their IP.
Which incidently is something I bet you also don't agree with, the way IP is managed throughtout the industry.
Once upon a time I did think like that, during my FOSS/GNU/Linux phase, then I had the opportunity to have a glimpse how the industry works from the inside, not how people think they should.
Are you aware that even Intel is not putting that much effort on their Vulkan drivers for Windows?
> No, I represente those that have real life experience in the industry, and don't care one little second about lock-in
An oxymoron. Those who care about the industry understand perfectly well, how lock-in is a problem for it. It's like saying that MS cared about the Web so much, that they pushed ActiveX, to benefit it.
Dan Baker (from Oxide) wrote[1] about problems of lock-in and need for portability in computer graphics. And don't try claiming he doesn't know about the industry, he is one of the creators of DirectX itself.
Oxide put their words in action, and were involved in Mantle creation, and naturally participate in the Vulkan working group.
> don't see lock-in as a burden, rather as a way to make the game exclusive and sell their IP. Which incidently is something I bet you also don't agree wit
Yes, I see exclusivity as a stinking practice. Why would creator want to exclude some users on purpose? Normal creator tries the opposite, to reach as many users as possible. Only backwards thinking legacy publishers don't do that. But they aren't equal to creators.
Also, normal creators don't call their art "IP". Just a hint for you, whom you really represent.
> Dan Baker (from Oxide) wrote[1] about problems of lock-in and need for portability in computer graphics. And don't try claiming he doesn't know about the industry, he is one of the creators of DirectX itself.
You mean the same one that a year later wrote about how cool it is that Oxide supports DX 12?
> You mean the same one that a year later wrote about how cool it is that Oxide supports DX 12?
The main point that you conveniently ignored in the link above was this:
> Oxide has a strong interest in supporting platforms
> beyond Windows. Our hope is that Mantle will be a call
> to arms to bring an industrial-strength API to such
> platforms as SteamOS, Linux, Android and MacOS. The
> biggest problem for us moving to other platforms is the
> relative weakness of the graphics software on the
> platforms. Added to this is that we yet have no word on
> whether we can have D3D12 on Windows 7. From a business
> standpoint, it makes little sense to rely exclusively on
> Microsoft doing the right thing.
You of course would pretend he didn't mean that. But he did, and he spoke about Vulkan quite a number of times.
Vulkan came out when exactly? Yes, February 2016. So he couldn't have spoken about implementation of WIP API in their own engine until then. But he spoke about Vulkan design itself around that time, like "Going Wide: Vulkan and Many Threads". See https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/developers/library/20...
See others in that presentation talking about the need for common standard. And again, don't try to claim they aren't representing the industry - all those people undeniably are representing it.
> As I said, you don't get how the industry works.
The "industry" you have in your mind doesn't represent creators, but backwards thinking legacy players like MS who profit from lock-in. They aren't moving the industry forward. You made it clear whom you support.
Carmack didn't like OpenGL, and partially he was right about OpenGL's shortcomings. We was wrong however in his proposed solution (using DX). Using lock-in instead of making better open APIs is a really bad idea. Luckily others understood it better than him.
Indeed, forward thinking studios and developers decided to fix this mess and participated in making Vulkan. Legacy thinking publishers, not so much. They aren't innovators in any sense of the word.
It's available anywhere where developers have access to the drivers. Which highlights the point exactly. Those who care to fix the lock-in mess, help. Those who want to keep the balkanized status quo, actively prevent improving the situation. Trying to justify such behavior isn't just hypocritical - it's absurd.
Microsoft's board made the best call in selecting Satya Nadella. Bringing an outsider was the sexy thing to do but I think today's earnings show the wiseness in picking the right person for the job.
From a high level it is looking that way. Response to recent MS products has been good (surface and surface studio). Apple can't get away from negative press (the headphone jack, lack of innovative features, lack of ports on macbook, touchbar etc).
I am hoping that Apple really knocks it out of the park with the iPhone 8 given the 10 year anniversary an dall.
Looking at recent trends, I think the innovation on iPhone 8 is going to be
1) Slimmer than ever (remember to bring your battery pack)
2) No-bezel screen (remember to bring your bumper case)
3) Force touch on the home button too
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).
I know a number of women that complain that phones no longer fit in their pockets; and a number of cracked screens from mishaps relating to this issue.
(Specifically because pockets on women's clothing tend to be smaller, especially in jeans.)
Personally I think the iPhone 5 (5S, 5SE and those before it) had the correct screen size. With one hand, most users could reach the entire screen. With the larger screen size, that's no longer the case without some awkward handling.
Therefore I think Apple (and others) should make 4" screen but make the body a bit thicker to accommodate a larger battery. I want a larger battery, but not a larger screen.
I had the original Motorola Droid and the Droid Bionic, both with no case, and the iPhone 6 Plus with a case is certainly thinner than either of those phones with no case. Since I put it in my pocket, I certainly don't want it to be any thicker. Yeah the Droid fit in my pocket too but I would not go back to a phone of that thickness even if the battery lasted for days.
I wasn't going to buy a case, because I wasn't going to drop the phone. A friend of mine talked me into buying a case because I would drop the phone. I bought a case, put it on, and dropped the phone the next day (no damage). Yay friends!
I wonder how much of Apple's bad press is due to the absense of Steve's RDF? The iPod was ridiculed for lack of features, and Apple made a point of removing rather than adding... yet succeeded. Wires are a nuisance... earpods are innovative. Perhaps it's really a deficit in selling-it.
OTOH smartphones and desktops have overshot demand, so it's downhill whatever they do.
I hope Microsoft uses some of that profit and fixes Azure Blobs. I was hoping to use them instead of S3 for static site hosting (ended up going with Gitlab) and it doesn't support even the most basic of functionality. [1]
I would not expect it to get implemented soon. It is not a very common use case. I don't think there are a lot of people/businesses run static HTML websites. So unless someone at MS convinces themselves that this is indeed a nice-to-have feature, it probably won't get implemented.
Same thing happened with ICMP (ping) support in Azure: Azure does not support ICMP. I personally expected this feature to get implemented for 4 years I worked there because I needed it myself many times. Turns out people can totally live without it and it is not a deal breaker. Last week this request got rejected for a foreseeable future. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/217313-networking/suggesti...
For instance, Google Cloud Storage (GCS) support static websites, and in addition you can use the "gsutil rsync" command, which works just like rsync to upload your website with the Google Cloud SDK. I was impressed when I first found that out. And it works out of the box just fine, I'll migrate my website to this soon.
Disclaimer: former Azure employee now working at Google.
Seems like the best you can really do is have a micro instance running nginx with some reverse-proxy rules. Which is a bit of a shame. It looks like you can't even do what you want with Azure Functions.
In a certain respect I can also see that meaning "we don't sell WebTV anymore, I think we can lose people that were maintaining that crap." I mean heck, they shut it down only in late 2013 years and years after it left consumer consciousness, who knows how many random enterprises were trying to keep paying Microsoft to maintain the business equivalents of Microsoft Bob, right?
Does drive home the point that making consumer products is really hard? I mean their Surface, phone business seems down but B2B(Azure) is thriving[0]. Comparing that to Apple's business wouldn't be all that fair?
Surface is only down 2%, practically flat, which is actually pretty impressive considering the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book are over a year old and expecting refreshes soon.
From the look of what is on display in consumer stores across a few European countries I visit regularly, I am betting they will wipe out the lower segment of hybrid tablets and netbooks.
Nowadays the majority of those devices on display are running Windows 10, not Android or OEM variant of GNU/Linux.
Maybe. But after having used a Win10 tablet for a while i find that the whole "app" side of things feels bolted on.
If you want to do some serious file manipulations you invariably has to drop back to the age old file explorer and the related Win32 file picker window. And those are anything but fun to operate via a touch screen.
