Microsoft's results are in, but the E7 subscription remains mythical. For now The guessing game over when and if Microsoft might add an E7 tier to its Microsoft 365 lineup continues following the company's latest results. At present, Microsoft has two enterprise tiers, E3 and E5, which offer businesses a variety of services, including productivity and security applications. Other options include tiers …
The case for an E7 would be something like you'd get 2-3 add-ons for the price of 1.5-2, so someone may be inclined to go for the package to get the deal, spending a bit more per user than if they just went for the add-on they were after. We've done that in a few cases, eg an O365 E3 + PowerBI Pro is about the same as O365 E5.
Then the partners rub their paws together because they get to "train" you on everything you didn't realise you wanted...!
The dilemma is often that the Microsoft platform now encompasses so much of what 75 percent of business users use, want and need, that IT providers are focussing directly on it and deskilling in everything else.
Management will buy Microsoft because it's quite cheap and all works together. Single vendor removes interoperability issues, near universal acceptance of Microsoft as the desktop platform of choice means development and compatibility are good. Conversely it's also the largest attack surface and massively disruptive when it goes down.
We have backed ourselves into this corner, and need to ensure we protect ourselves and our data. The clever ones can still operate their businesses when Microsoft, Google or AWS are down.
@Tim Kemp
"Conversely it's also the largest attack surface and massively disruptive when it goes down".
As said previously, Microsoft and its offerings now form the biggest sinigle point of failure for most businesses world-wide.
What can go wrong?
Ps: Or, as NDA said, "Do not be alarmed; be very, very frightened".
---> What will happen to the economy the day it all falls apart.
Microsoft has always favored complexity over simplicity. if not just for the fact that add-ons offer more flexible options. It's easy to change individual options and only would affect those that have that option, whereas if they want to change an "E7" subscription, it would trigger more customers looking at that level.
Just look at their Azure Entra pricing. Confusion with the likelihood of paying more than one has to (absolutely, with the offering's structure intentional by design). MS Management may be greedy, unethical a$$h#les, but they're not stupid greedy a$$h#les. The philosophy of complexity permeates the company. For another example of complexity, look at their Terms of Service documents...
For smaller companies that engage with MS at the subscription level, I fear that one day, the Management (or the owners) of those companies are going to wake some morning and realize that 50+ % of their profits/revenue are now going to M$ and not a damn thing that they can do about it.
Subscriptions/Services (where this is no/little competition) are evil. If your data is not on your hardware/premise, you don't own it. Period, It's that simple.One can rationalize pretty much anything, but it doesn't alter the age-old adage: "possession is 9/10 of the law". Maybe the GDPR helps, but not anywhere outside of the EU. Especially if your company's size is in Microsoft's business "noise". Do you really think Microsoft cares about your company or you?
>and realize that 50+ % of their profits/revenue are now going to M$ and not a damn thing that they can do about it.
Its the modern business model. The economist Varofakis identified something like this in his book "Technofeudalism" but I think even he didn't quite grasp the full implications. Instead of corporations exploiting both human and capital resources directly they control the keys that those traditional corporations need to operate. Even government becomes subservient -- it ceases to be a tool for regulating society for the benefit of society and just becomes an enforcement arm for the megacorps.
Because there are two types of people that use LLMs...those that know how to set one up locally and configure it with access to the appropriate hardware and those that don't.
Eventually, models will become smaller and trained with specific data for specific tasks and all of them will run locally on demand...until then though, we have cloud based LLMs you pay for that just "work" and humungous local ones that require a beast of a machine to run that require some effort.
If you want to use LLMs and have an edge over everyone else, you run your own if you have the expertise...if you want to just keep up, not fall behind and you don't have the expertise, then you pay for a cloud service...because it's cheaper than paying for the expertise and it is "enough".
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