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It’s Brexploitation! Microsoft punishes UK for Brexit with cloud price-gouging

P. Lee

>You are aware that data centres, no matter where they are located, require quite a lot of gear not made in the UK and mostly priced in, or at least with prices based on, USD, yes...?

I think the point is that the DC's are already up and running. Incremental costs do not justify the price hike across the board. E.g. getting UK engineers to service the DC just got cheaper, UK electricity just got cheaper. Imported stuff is not the only cost so even passing on the full cost increase wouldn't give you the full currency difference. All the income from non-UK accounts using UK DC facilities just got far more profitable... and yet, price gouging.... because we can.

Welcome to the Cloud. We own your data, we own your infrastructure. We own your business.

We also know that if you had a choice, you'd probably have already gone to AWS. So we're guessing there's an inelastic demand curve in play. Since the global economy has gone down the toilet, we haven't really added anything new and beneficial and we can't sell more stuff, we're going to have to hike prices to maintain our margins. That's not a long-run strategy, but I'm going to make sure I get my bonus.

If you own your own IT, you can sweat the assets in the hard times. The whole point of XaaS is to stop you doing that. Did you really build your business profitability on the basis of favourable exchange rates, did you? The price hike is bad enough, what happens if your supplier goes out of business? How long will it take you to find another supplier? Ah, you've tied your business to a single supplier with no hope of an alternative due to IP laws protecting the APIs? We're not just talking "unsupported" here, we're talking "gone." What if your supplier is Lehman Bros?

IT vendors have been vertically integrating because you can't trust third parties with your business. IT users need to learn the same lesson.

TL/DR; The economy is shot and the Emperor of Eternal Increases in Profitability has no clothes. Cut-price goods and services are usually shoddy value.

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