Posts by Cloudy Day

IBM Cloud stops signing and seeking new customers for its VMware service

Re: "VMware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

But the they have raised the amount of licence revenue by 600% across the 65 % of customers that stay on VMware…

….and that’s why you will never be a board member..,,

Former and current Microsofties react to the latest round of layoffs

Re: Micro shafted

I dunno. Microsoft did pay OK. I made a small fortune there. Was a particularly pleasant work environment though…

Re: MS is the new IBM

Apparently, the British army were using Win CE to ranger artillery as far back as 2003…

Broadcom sends VMware to record revenue, margins, as most big customers sign for private cloud bundles

Re: The lesson

Many mid level managers in corporate IT departments only know VMWare. Their entire career resides on the technology. They will fight tooth and nail to renew the VMware contracts, as that keeps them in a job.

Companies need to realise that getting rid of VMware from their organisation is not a technology challenge, it is an HR challenge….

VMware drops the lowest tier of its partner program – except in Europe

I have come to realise that…

In every large corporate there are teams of IT folk’s designing and operating the organisations DCs. These folks live and breathe VMware. It’s all they know. They are mouthing platitudes to management layers above about ‘how terrible Broadcom is’. But in reality, they will aggressively fight any suggestion that the company moves away from VMware. They don’t care about the price increases. They just want to keep their jobs and keep doing things the way they have always done them.

If you want to get rid of VMware, then I increasingly think you need to get rid of this cohort of people as well. Maybe start searching through HR records looking for people who have a lot of VMware certs. These people will likely behind a lot of the blocking and obfuscation tactics that are employed to delay or avoid the move away from Broadcom products.

I also suspect Broadcom have worked this out, and are confident that their network of ‘inside agents’ will successfully mitigate any move away from their tech….

VMware price hikes? Between 800 and 1,500%, claim Euro customers

The reality is….

That the IT ops teams in most enterprises feel that any move away from VMware would put their jobs at risk. So they are doing everything in their power to resist any change away from VMware.

CIOs and CTOs are spluttering in indignation at the price hikes, and issuing edicts saying they will move away from Broadcom. But their direct reports, two or three levels in the organisation, are fighting those edicts with every ounce of energy they can bring to bear.

AWS claims 50% of Azure workloads would jump ship if licensing costs allowed

Aside from the Windows Server stuff, that gets discussed all the time…

SQL licenses in Azure can be used to cover Azures ‘managed’ SQL offerings but are blocked from the equivalent Managed SQL offerings in GCP/AWS. And customers, almost without exception, want to use managed SQL rather than SQL on unmanaged VMs.

Microsoft provide ‘free’ extended security updates for Windows/SQL in Azure, but not in GCP/AWS.

They let you use MSDN licensing in Azure for non prod, but not in AWS/GCP.

Want to do robotic process automation for a system that needs to access MS Office? Microsoft licensing terms completely block you from doing that in GCP/AWS

Wanna use Dynamics 365? Microsoft licensing terms forbid you from deploying any required software components on to GCP/AWS? Same with PowerBI server. There is just no legal way to use it in AWS/GCP.

Planning on using Citrix for cloud hosted VDI solution? The VDI users are likely going to want to run MS Office, and there is literally no way that customers can license that on VMs in GCP or AWS. But they can in Azure..,

And so on. It’s death by a thousand cuts that I personally think Microsoft consider as being too clever, or too complex or too subtle for folks like the CMA to notice.

Google, AWS say it's too hard for customers to use Linux to swerve Azure

Missing the point….

The point that has been missed in all these comments is that 70% of business application run on Windows Server. And the vast, and I mean vast, majority of these application are Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) products written by 3rd party ISVs. Everything from SAP running entire global enterprises to small line of business systems undertaking a specific function at an SMB.

Enterprises buy these application from the ISV. They don’t write them themselves. So they can’t ‘port’ the application off Windows as they have no access to the source code. They can only run the code the ISV creates on Operating Systems that the ISV dictates (and is prepared to support).

And Microsoft have spent many many years getting the ISV ecosystem to almost exclusively target Windows Server (and SQL Server). I should know, as I spent many many years at Microsoft doing exactly that….

Re: A mountain out of a small mole hill!

That’s actually wrong cliffwilliams45. There is no Software Assurance on Windows Server, no matter what Volume Licensing program the customer uses.

Also, there are critical products, like MS Office, that Microsoft use licensing terms to block completely from being deployed to GCP etc. This is a real issue for many enterprise systems, like SAP etc, that require a copy of office running on the backend servers to output reports in Excel/Word. This is a real issue that barely gets a mention.

Fear of the unknown keeps Broadcom's VMware herd captive. Don't be cowed

The reality is…

That this is a people issue. The people tasked with planning to migrate off VMware are the same people that have spent their entire careers honing their VMware skills.. These people drive GUIs and the command line terrifies them. They will touch their forelocks and say ‘yes boss’ when the CIO tells them to investigate alternatives, and then behind the scenes they will block, obfuscate and ridicule any Suggs that does not involve them renewing the Broadcom agreement for a further three years. ‘Too tricky not to’ they cry en masse :)

Microsoft joins CISPE, the Euro cloud crew that tried to curb its licensing

My suspicion is that some people within the CIPSE org may may received some cheques along the way

Microsoft trims jobs as new year begins

I reckon I still PTSD…

From my 15+ years at Microsoft. And I quit working there about 8 years ago. That ‘Growth Mindset’ stuff was clearly identifiable as 100% bull$hit right from the get go. You only have to read Carol Dwecks book, which is full of utterly implausible case studies, to realise this,

Microsoft pay well and working there is basically endurance test of putting up with bullshit until your share options vest and you meet you financial goals in life.

The elusive dream of cloud portability: Why migrating workloads isn't so simple

This article…

Falls in to the usual trap of assuming most corporate applications are built, not bought. The reverse is true. I reckon that 90+% of applications corporates are running are 3rd party authored packages written by ISVs. And 70% of them run on Windows. These apps live on VMs and the question of how they can be deployed or ‘modernised’ is dependent entirely on what the ISV is prepared to support. So the ability to move a 3rd party app from an VM in Azure to a VM in GCP to a VM in AWS is what matters. And that isn’t super hard, once you have landing zones etc in place. It tends to come down to skills within the companies IT org and what they are happy/familiar with.

Microsoft extends Azure into Oracle cloud to satisfy OpenAI

Finally!

Does that mean that Azure will finally be ‘unbreakable”? Wow! Took quite a while to get there though…

Chuckle.

Oracle Java police start knocking on Fortune 200's doors for first time

Re: How does this play out for Oracle ?

I assume the likes of JDE, Siebel etc will only be ‘supported’ on oracle Java?

UK CMA early findings indicate Microsoft restricts cloud choice

I fail to see..

…..Why license compliance would be ‘worse’ in the cloud than on-prem. MS are telling fibs as well about being able to run all of their software on all clouds’. Try finding a way you can license PowerBI Server, or an M365 Unattended Agent on a listed provider for example….

VMware by Broadcom has a licensing portability win with Microsoft

Imagine…..

What inferences Microsoft will draw if Broadcom's get away with what they are trying to impose on their customers!! You will no doubt shortly be seeing your EA prices go up by a factor of 10. Because Microsoft will be of the opinion that if Broadcom got away with it, then so can they…

Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

Re: Fingers crossed

But it won’t succeed. As much as I dislike Microsoft, I can tell you right now that this project will fail. Mainly because the council will have numerous third party packages that have integration dependencies on Office. This will be coupled with the majority of users hating having to learn a new Office package UI, plus the loss of specific and relied upon functionality within tools like Teams.

MSFT will just fire the account manager that ‘lost’ the account and wait three years for the customer to return, tail between their legs. Office is a monopoly business. I wish it weren’t.

Cloud vendor lock-in is shocking, but there's a get out of jail card

Re: Why stop at cloud?

In the real world it’s not that simple. Many customers would love to use an office alternative, but user familiarity, 3rd party application integration requirements, Microsoft ‘every desktop’ EA licensing dictats, lack of feature parity and existing sunk investment in processes and assets that require Office to operate are huge blockers to change.

Microsoft Teams decouples from Office 365 suite globally

I wonder

…. If they will change the license terms for the ‘decoupled’ Teams version so that it can run on VMs in GCP, AWS and Alibaba. If they don’t, then this announcement is just lipstick on a pig.

Microsoft promises Copilot will be a 'moneymaker' in the long term

Apparently....

You can delegate copilot to attend teams meetings on you behalf. So it joins the meeting and captures a transcript etc. I was at an event the other day and this customer was talking about their experience around doing this whilst on the co-pilot pilot. They have a morning status meeting which is very boring. So, one day, one person sent co-pilot to 'represent' them. Next day, two people sent co-pilot. And so on. They were sayiong that pretty soon the morning status meeting would be entirely populated by co-pilots, rather than people.

Of course, this is when the co-pilots will start talking to each other. Otherwise known as the singularity :)

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

When I was at Microsoft….

Nothing amused us more than reading the posts from Linux on the PC desktop zealots. We would have wagers about how long the decision would take to be reversed on the rare occasions a large company announced a move to open office.

By most metrics, Linux has already won most markets.

But these ‘on the desktop’ type articles serve only to stoke the sense of failure in the Linux community, and superiority in the MS community and in my view, they delay the inevitable

A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value

Re: Employment Fiddle

A good, or even mediocre, IT salesperson in Australia will have no problem earning more than the prime minister, so not all roles are poorly paid. Whether the RIGHT roles are poorly paid is a different question though…

European cloud providers locked in talks with Microsoft over licensing complaint

The damage they have already done is tremendous

There are many, many customers out there who have already been coerced in to Azure as a result of Microsofts licensing ‘rules’. I would suspect that since 2019 they represent the single biggest growth engine for Azure. A customer who has, for example, been forced to move their VDI estate from GCP to Azure because of the 2019 licensing changes Microsoft made will have spent vast amounts of money on the migration, for literally no benefit. Microsoft should be made to pay redress.

Google submits complaints about Microsoft licensing to UK competition regulator

I reckon this all going to come down to Office…

There are a large number of scenarios where customers need to run MS Office on backend servers to support server based applications (PeopleSoft, JD Edwards etc). There is literally no way to license this as Microsoft have ‘forbidden’ Office licenses to be installed on EC2 or GCE. Word on the street is that Microsoft reps know this and are refusing to provide customers with any option other than ‘move the application to Azure’’.

My personal opinion is that this would seem to be leveraging their monopoly in the desktop application space to force customers in to Azure. Which is surely a bit dodgy from a competition law perspective?

Microsoft adds FPGA-powered network accelerator to Azure

AWS have had Nitro for many years

Is this just Microsoft trying to catch up? Are they really THAT far behind?

Imagine a world without egress fees or cloud software license disparities

Re: Imagine a world without egress fees or cloud software license disparities

And then you just need need to port every software application that only runs on Windows so that it runs and in supported on Linux. Simples.

Microsoft still prohibits Google or Alibaba from running O365 Windows Apps

The thing i want to know is…

What, exactly, are Microsoft going to do if you ignore their rules about not running Office 365 on GCP, Alibaba or even EC2 come to that?

Usually, when you break a Microsoft licensing ‘rule’, they hit you up for a ‘compliance’ order. You are forced to buy the licenses that allow you to do what you have been doing.

But in this case, there are NO licenses you can buy that allow you to run on GCP, Alibaba or EC2.

So, what are they going to do? Turn off O365? Most organisations (banks, governments, healthcare etc) would not be able to operate without running Microsoft Office. Is this really what Microsoft are threatening?

Microsoft concession: You can run our wares in AWS virtual desktop under 'revised policy'

Still not fixing the elephant in the room.

Two elephants actually. The first is that customers who (quite legally) implemented their office VDI on EC2 are forced to spend vast amounts of money moving it somewhere other than EC2, due to Microsoft’s October 2019 licensing rule change.

And the 2nd is that applications that require a sever side copy of Office to run still cannot be deployed on EC2 as there is no way to license Office on EC2.

Both of these situations massively favour Azure. I would be highly surprised if Microsoft are unaware of this….. I

Antitrust clouds continue to gather over Microsoft's European business

Re: Cry me a river

The issue is that Microsoft cannot compete technically with the likes of AWS and GCP, so they have to try coerce customers in to Azure using dodgy licensing practices that leverage their dominance in the Office productivity space. It is the legality of driving Azure adoption through restrictive Office 365 licensing terms that I suspect will be scrutinised by the regulators.

Goodbye Azure AD, Entra the drag on your time and money

Competition authorities are closing in…

You know that Active Directory service you had MSFT…. that was clearly market dominant? Seems you have been using it to force customers to stand up an Azure footprint if they want to use your other monopoly products, like M365.

MSFT response: oh noooooooo. These customers been standing up an ENTRA service. Nothing AT ALL to do with Azure or AD…..

Germany sours on Microsoft again, launches antitrust review

Look at what they are doing with O365 licensing…

You cannot legally run VDI infrastructure ( with Office 365 installed) or install Office on servers to support application integration requirements on any major cloud other than Azure. This strikes me as being extremely dubious from a completion perspective. Leveraged their almost total domination in the desktop productivity apps space to drive Azure adoption. Very shady indeed.

You're not imagining it. Amazon and AWS want to hire all your friends, enemies, and everyone in between

Better than MS

Having spent many years at MS and a couple at AWS, I can state that AWS pays better than MS, is a nicer place to work, is FAR less metrics obsessed and that reps at AWS are not encouraged to coerce their customers in to buying software/cloud services they do not need through the threat of being audited. Work pressure, work life balance and general politics are about the same. AWS employees are encouraged to invent new ways of doing things. MS employees are expected to keep ploughing up and down their tightly defined swim lane, at a speed chosen by an incompetent manager, furiously bull$hitting customers as they do so.