
Microsoft will donate $1B in cloud services to nonprofits and universities - brozak
http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/01/19/how-were-putting-the-microsoft-cloud-to-work-for-the-public-good/
======
Jedd
Never entirely sure how to take some of these announcements. Prima facie it
sounds great and laudable ... but I'm old, and my memory is full of stories of
similar-sounding attempts to get youth mindshare with dubious subsidies of
gear into schools, and the old classic of $100m to fund HIV research, $400m to
fund ways to destroy GNU/Linux. [1] I know - people tell me - it's a whole new
Microsoft these days.

[1]
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/13/gates_gives_100m_to_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/13/gates_gives_100m_to_fight/)

~~~
ntakasaki
They do a lot of things like most big companies, and some people seem to
concentrate only the bad.

For example, they started funding OpenSSL and other core infrastructure[1]
projects of the Linux foundation after the Heartbleed fiasco. But you don't
find that kind of news on here.

By the way "$400m to fund ways to destroy GNU/Linux" seems to be quite
hyperbolic, especially coming from 'The Register'. The link in the article
goes to a 404 page, do you have any real details of the so called campaign?

[1] [https://threatpost.com/group-backed-by-google-microsoft-
to-h...](https://threatpost.com/group-backed-by-google-microsoft-to-help-fund-
openssl-and-other-open-source-projects/105672/)

~~~
Jedd
TheReg link works fine here. You're right about Reg style, though I have no
reason to doubt substance of the story.

Agreed on range of perception of deeds of any large company. Microsoft has
long form on this front (baiting the education market), though they're
certainly not the only organisation to have done this. Unlike other student
discounts - say for movie tickets, public transport, etc - there's a clear and
obvious future payback for providing free or heavily discounted software &
services to that demographic, as opposed to just charging less to customers
who can't afford full price.

Also, IIRC it's a requirement in the USA that public (and not-NFP) companies
must always act to 'increase shareholder value', so the giving away of
products or services could be considered a legal exposure. The obvious way to
work around this concern is to label it marketing, which brings us back to
where we came in.

EDIT: Sorry - misread your 404 question -- try these:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20030604185301/http://economicti...](https://web.archive.org/web/20030604185301/http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=28059762)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20030604185306/http://economicti...](https://web.archive.org/web/20030604185306/http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=28055647)

~~~
ntakasaki
>Also, IIRC it's a requirement in the USA that public (and not-NFP) companies
must always act to 'increase shareholder value', so the giving away of
products or services could be considered a legal exposure. The obvious way to
work around this concern is to label it marketing, which brings us back to
where we came in.

There is no such requirement.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-
the-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-myth-of-
maximizing-shareholder-
value/2014/02/11/00cdfb14-9336-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html)

[http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-
cor...](http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-
obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits)

>EDIT: Sorry - misread your 404 question -- try these:

I read those and I don't find anything to justify OPs "$400m to fund ways to
destroy GNU/Linux" or The Register's characterization of '$421m to fight
Linux".

~~~
Jedd
Happy to be disabused on the shareholder value front. In AU we're obliged to
consider shareholder interests, but with no constraint to prioritise short-
term gains. No idea how far this has been tested by case law.

------
ralmidani
This is the same old strategy of giving students discounts which get them
accustomed to proprietary products, then marketing to those same students when
they graduate.

Now it's just adapted for remotely-hosted software.

~~~
x5n1
How many successful startups have actually been built on top on Microsoft
software. I know Plenty of Fish is one example, but you just don't hear of
that many examples of successful startups built on top of Microsoft's stack.
The reason being that paying Microsoft's tax as you scale eats into your
profits and your growth.

~~~
biot
I'm sure a few here have run across Stack Overflow.

edit: [http://highscalability.com/stack-overflow-
architecture](http://highscalability.com/stack-overflow-architecture)

~~~
jenscow
The article confirms:

 _It 's hard to separate out the Microsoft stack and the scale up approach
because for licensing reasons they tend to go together. If you find yourself
in the position of transitioning from scale up to scale out by adding dozens
of cores, MS licensing will bite you._

~~~
biot
You know what else is crazy? If you find yourself in the position of scaling
your dev team because your business is successful, salaries will bite you. If
you thought MS licensing was expensive, try hiring senior developers! :)

------
avar
Between this and the ChakraCore news item on the front page I've been
wondering whether Microsoft really has been changed its behavior since the
90s, or whether this is just how they play the game when they're not in a
position of strength as they are with node.js and cloud services.

It's pretty telling from the ChakraCore thread not entirely being "They're
obviously trying to embrace, extend, extinguish node.js like they did Java"
that people have either forgotten their modus operandi, or that I'm too much
of a cynic and they've genuinely changed.

Sometimes I think I'm being too cynical and they're now just as "nice" as some
other companies which have a mostly healthy relationship with open source &
open architectures.

But then again all the news where they're being more open these days have to
do with areas where they don't have established lock-in, including projects
like .Net & ChakraCore which formed the basis of some of the major projects
where they lost the lock-in wars.

Are they just trying to lure users they've lost back into their sphere of
influence so they can tighten the noose again, or are they genuinely doing
business differently now?

I don't know, but it's hard to place any trust in them when you've been burned
so many times, and even though they have a new CEO middle management & their
business model has a lot of inertia.

~~~
sremani
Posts like this remind me of the quote in N.N.Taleb's Antifragile book, The
mind fights yesterday's war, but the body fights tomorrow's war (in the
context of biological systems under stress).

Some minds here are fighting a decade old war and no good deed goes unpunished
in HN comments.

~~~
x5n1
Look they released their Javascript engine with no JIT compiler for Linux.
It's the same Microsoft because they are in it for money and dominance. A
leopard can't change its spots. Microsoft will always be the same, no matter
what they say. They are simply changing themselves to be more like Google
because they know their old strategy does not work in the new world.

If anything it's Microsoft which is fighting yesterday's war with today's
strategy.

~~~
PeCaN
To be fair we don't know that they won't port the JIT over eventually. I can't
imagine it's a high priority.

~~~
x5n1
And that's all you have to do, just keep saying we're working on it, and turn
to the next question. All ways of getting people to use your operating system
and your eco-system while keeping the rhetoric of we're open now. And they
can't be it's not in their nature. They have a whole lot of business interests
which will keep them the same old, same old.

------
teddyh
So they are giving away, to educational institutions, a limited amount of a
consumable resource which is amenable to lock-in effects (i.e. addictive), and
problematic for privacy (i.e. harmful to users). In effect, they are standing
outside schools giving away cigarettes.

~~~
necessity
What cloud service would not have those issues?

I think it's a great thing. People already use Azure or some other provider at
these institutes (I know my uni does). If Microsoft wants to trade free
services for market share, everyone partaking benefits from it -- unlike
cigarrets at schools. If you or your institution don't want to partake, don't.
I know I won't.

~~~
xg15
Every cloud service would have, indeed.

But there is no reason the support has to be "free" access to cloud resources
at all. Why not just donate the money and let the nonprofits choose which
cloud to use (or whether to use a cloud at all)?

~~~
nrb
Because if you give 1 billion dollars away, you are 1 billion less wealthy. If
you give away 1 billion dollars worth of Azure credits, you are some much
smaller percentage of 1 billion less wealthy, and the recipient is still
receiving 1 billion in value.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> you are some much smaller percentage of 1 billion less wealthy, and the
> recipient is still receiving 1 billion in value.

Would you mind explaining how one can create value merely by donating?

------
bdavisx
So without knowing more details, without some special effort on the nonprofits
side, I'm guessing this will lock them into an Azure architecture. That could
be OK if MS continues the donations after the initial $1B runs out, otherwise
it could end up costing the nonprofits/.edu's more in the long run than if
they went with a more open path now.

~~~
partiallypro
You can use only open source software in Azure if you like. I don't really
understand your complaint. You could even migrate your VMs elsewhere.

------
jessaustin
I suspect this move _is_ somewhat motivated by the "first hit is free"
strategy as other commentators have speculated. This is probably secondary,
however, to the fact that Azure has been temporarily overbuilt (or, somewhat
equivalently, over-contracted). That is, they bought all of this equipment,
fewer people than expected are using it, so instead of just dropping the price
for their services this seemed more interesting. It also happens to be easier
to construe as "evil" than dropping the price would have been, so I'm not sure
they'll come out ahead in terms of PR...

------
ggreer
The criticisms here remind me of The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics[1]:

> The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or
> interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very
> least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the
> problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of
> the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you
> interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I
> don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.

Microsoft is giving away _a billion dollars_ worth of services, yet people are
criticizing them for it. There are several reasons why that's unwarranted.

First, universities and non-profits don't _have_ to choose Microsoft. If they
think the risks of lock-in or later expenses will outweigh the donated
services, they won't pick it. These organizations aren't populated by idiots,
and Microsoft makes the terms of their deals clear before any contracts are
entered. There's no coercion or trickery.

Second, when it comes to these sorts of discounts, Microsoft is late to the
party. AWS gives free stuff to schools and non-profits. Apple has education
discounts. People would be outraged if these companies ended these discounts.
Yet people are outraged at Microsoft for offering similar discounts. You can't
have it both ways.

Third, I seriously doubt that Microsoft is doing this as a purely cynical,
profit-seeking move. I can't find any mention of a time limit on the free
services. Not in Nadella's announcement. Not in responses to Q&A. Nowhere.
There's also the fact that, for the past couple of years, Microsoft has been
giving Office 365 away to non-profits and schools. Once they validate your
organization (to make sure you're not trying to scam them), they give it away,
for free, forever. What's the ulterior motive there? That people might use it,
like it, and pay for it at home or at a different job? That's completely
unobjectionable.

One last point: People like to accuse companies of predatory discounts, but
nobody brings up the opposite. What about the countless free-loaders who use
as much of a service as they can without paying, then move on to something
else? I've seen people brag about using free servers from Rackspace, AWS, and
Azure, with no intention of paying those companies a cent. As soon as the
discount runs out, they move on. There is little condemnation of these
tactics. If anything, many social circles celebrate them. This is a clear
double-standard.

1\. [http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-
ethi...](http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/)

~~~
Jedd
You make some great points, and I'm genuinely torn on how I _should_ feel
about the announcement.

I'll comment on only one of your points, though:

    
    
      > Microsoft is giving away a billion dollars worth of services,
      > yet people are criticizing them for it. 
    

1\. I don't think people are criticising the _act_ of giving something away.
It's the questioning of the motivations behind that.

2\. The billion dollars is a retail value -- and the retail pricing is defined
by Microsoft. I know these kinds of announcements (from everyone) always use
retail value, but it's a disingenuous way of determining actual value.

~~~
dogma1138
Doesn't really matter it's like saying that donations are worth less because
you can get tax credit for them.

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?

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
(a) It would actually indeed be more accurate to quote the difference in
assets the donation is causing for you--anything beyond that is arguably being
paid by other tax payers.

(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.

~~~
dogma1138
>It would actually indeed be more accurate to quote the difference in assets
the donation is causing for you--anything beyond that is arguably being paid
by other tax payers.

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).

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> 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.

(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.

~~~
dogma1138
>(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.

I'm not sure you understand how tax deductions work.

Donating to charity allows you to claim a portion of that donation as a
deductible, this can vary depending circumstances but in most cases you have a
limit for the deductibles for gross income and the amount it self is usually
not deducted in full regardless of limits when it comes to non-cash property
(this is also gets more complicated because you have carrybacks, other losses,
expenses etc.).

When Microsoft donates X amount of what ever to some one no one pays MSFT that
money back, they might get some tax relief for it that's all this doesn't mean
that you as an individual lose money in fact direct donation in many cases is
more efficient than indirect funding through taxation.

>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.

It doesn't affect the price of the service in any way regardless of what
portion of the global XAAS market or MSFT's own XAAS business it is. This
simply allows for organizations that would not afford access to these
resources at this scale before to have the opportunity to do so. It's also
spread across 3 years and includes all MSFT cloud services so Office 365,
Skype for Business/Lync, OneDrive etc. which makes is about 1/8th of their
currently yearly revenue from cloud products which means overall it's about
1/24th of it's yearly cloud related revenue over the duration of the program.

>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.

This holds true even if you build your infrastructure and platform in house
it's not like MSFT can donate universal credits

>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.

I am a non-profit or a school I don't sell rocks but I do need one, not
everyone operates a tradable commodity exchange... You don't value the price
of donated food at the local homeless soup kitchen by how much you could sell
it to some one on the street you value it based on how much you will have to
pay to make it on your own. And the people who actually receive the food tend
to value it based on how hungry they are....

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> When Microsoft donates X amount of what ever to some one no one pays MSFT
> that money back, they might get some tax relief for it that's all

I am not sure you understand how accounting works. You have a tax liability.
Now, you donate a million dollars (let's assume money for the sake of
simplicity). How is this donation reflected in your balance sheet? Well, your
bank owes you a million dollars less, and at the same time, you owe the state
250000 dollars (or whatever it is) less. Now, if the fact that your bank owes
you a million dollars less means that you paid the donation, then the fact
that you owe the state 250000 dollars less also means that the state has paid
you a quarter of a million dollars of your donation back. Or in other words:
That part of the donation is paid for by other tax payers.

> It doesn't affect the price of the service in any way regardless of what
> portion of the global XAAS market or MSFT's own XAAS business it is.

You have it all backwards. This is not about whether the donation changes the
price in other sales of the same service. This is about how you determine what
the price of a product is. You determine the price by figuring out what people
are paying for the product. Now, when _you_ do this, you simply discard one
giant transaction that happens in this market, for no good reason. This giant
transaction happens to be one where the price is zero.

> This holds true even if you build your infrastructure and platform in house
> it's not like MSFT can donate universal credits

(a) How does that change the fact that it's not a commodity?

(b) Actually, they could. People commonly call this "universal credit"
"money".

> You don't value the price of donated food at the local homeless soup kitchen
> by how much you could sell it to some one on the street you value it based
> on how much you will have to pay to make it on your own. And the people who
> actually receive the food tend to value it based on how hungry they are....

Which should all result in the same value, unless you are making a mistake.

~~~
dogma1138
>I am not sure you understand how accounting works. You have a tax liability.
Now, you donate a million dollars (let's assume money for the sake of
simplicity). How is this donation reflected in your balance sheet? Well, your
bank owes you a million dollars less, and at the same time, you owe the state
250000 dollars (or whatever it is) less. Now, if the fact that your bank owes
you a million dollars less means that you paid the donation, then the fact
that you owe the state 250000 dollars less also means that the state has paid
you a quarter of a million dollars of your donation back. Or in other words:
That part of the donation is paid for by other tax payers.

If you donate money you donate actual money, the deductibles are for potential
profits from your revenue.

Say I donated 1M to charity these 1M are gone they aren't mine any more, this
means that my buying power has been reduced by at least 1M and considering
credit even more, and I've just lost any potential ROI on that money. What I
can potentially get in return is the ability to deduct some of that amount
from my tax future tax liability this means that if I make enough money to pay
tax I could deduct a portion of the tax I would have to pay based on that
donation.

No one in this scenario gave me money, I've gave out 1M, I might get some of
it back however this isn't additional money that the tax payer has to pay that
just money that is gone from the tax system.

By this logic a company that operates at an operational loss or an individual
that their assets have resulted in a capital loss some how increase your tax
liability which is simply not the case.

Now you might say that if people lose money all the time and not pay taxes
eventually the Government will have to balance it out by taxing you more but
this doesn't really happen that often as organization will not exist in
operational loss which defers any tax liability on their account indefinitely
same goes for people which their assets continuously lose value.

And while you might say but hold on a second Charity allows you to get some
tax deduction and you can do that indefinitely well no no amount of charity
will cancel out your tax liability, the cap ensures that the amount which can
be deducted will always be considerably.

But you also need to remember that charity means that money goes to causes
that in most cases would be funded by public funds (with Religious
institutions being the only exception in some countries) this means that if
you donate 1M and get 250K in deductibles the banks owes you 1M less, you have
much less credit, you owe the state 250K less potentially but the state just
got 1M in surplus because it doesn't need to allocate funding.

Charity (when people actually donate money, goods or labor) in most cases
works exceptionally well when you actually donate to decent causes and not to
some Kony2012 BS (and before you complain about remember that to pass the
budget they US government ends up spending 100's of millions on nonsense like
investigating the effects of beavers on moose mating calls and the economical
implication of anti trust investigations against ice cream cartels in
Guatemala on US foreign interests) to the point where some countries either do
not put caps on charitable donations or are looking into removing them.

You need to understand that charity isn't a tax loop hole even with 100%
deductible. If I earned 2M paid 50% of that in taxes in a given year (n) I now
have 1M$, if I donate all of that to charity the government has technically
received 2M from me instead of 1M as it now doesn't have to pay out additional
1M to fund various project because I have done so in their place.

Not only that but technically depending on what I've donated too I've actually
increased their tax revenue potentially even more since some of my donation
could end up paying for goods (VAT/Sales tax), salaries, microloans for
businesses etc, housing (deed stamp tax (not sure if you have that in the US)
etc.

Now I'm out of 1M$ and i get it as a deductible and I carryback this
deductible to the next year to get my money back I need to make just as much
as I did last year while paying no taxes, so if I make 2M again I will have 2M
which is exactly the amount of money I would've have if i donated 0 to charity
and paid the full tax for each year (if i do not donate to charity I could
potentially have more money from capital gains).

This is pretty much the definition of a zero sum game or well to more
accurately put it equivalency - Charity is pretty much paying more "taxes" if
your deductibles are capped (especially at a percentage rather than a flat
sum) or extending credit / giving a tax free loan to society if you can deduct
the full amount (given you can make sufficient revenue or carryback the
deductible over subsequent years).

There is no case in which when Money Inc LLC or Richie Rich give 1M to charity
Johnny Bluecollar ends up paying more tax to in order to cover for them.

------
discordance
There seems to be a lot of concern these days about platform lock in with
Microsoft's new found philanthropic initiatives.

If one were to stick to IaaS, using only Azure hosted Linux VMs and not get
involved in any special Azure PaaS offerings, then any project hosted under
this model could easily avoid platform lock in and be transported to another
service provider at any time.

------
banku_brougham
$1B * COGS / Retail Price

A $200M donation?

------
shorsusan1
As a student, I prefer Google. The integration or multi-platform services of
Google is better. I got free Microsoft services from my school but I never use
it.

------
cowardlydragon
MS knows that computing habits for "work" start mainly in university, so this
is really just marketing not charity.

------
jupiter90000
My favorite part is this piece: "Cloud services can unlock the secrets held by
data in ways that create new insights and lead to breakthroughs"

How's that? Am I missing something?

~~~
outside1234
Big Data Processing? Machine Learning on that data?

I can think of lots of ways the cloud can help.

~~~
jupiter90000
Cloud services alone don't make what is said possible. Perhaps they'll be able
to afford specialists to build what you are thinking of with the money saved
from the Microsoft granted credits? Won't the university or non-profit need to
hire a 'big data engineer' to build something using the services? Also
analysts to know what to look for? The statement makes it sound as if the
cloud can unlock it, but it's really people trained to know how to use the
cloud to unlock it that make it possible, in my opinion.

------
simonebrunozzi
Title should change to: "Microsoft is donating several Billion dollars worth
of lock-in into their proprietary technologies".

~~~
kenjackson
Would you feel the way if Apple donated $1B worth of iPads and iPhones? I feel
like most people wouldn't, yet it also lock-in into their proprietary
technology.

~~~
ginko
>Would you feel the way if Apple donated $1B worth of iPads and iPhones?

Yeah

------
gooserock
"First one's free."

------
verusfossa
Seeing what Microsoft has done recently with privacy on their newest operating
system, I would not have high hopes for their cloud services. Of course the
organizations should be weighing all the pros and cons but I share the
sentiment that once the freebie well dries up, terms might be re-evalutaed or
services held hostage. Also, and I know the OneDrive plan shakeup fiasco is
not apples to apples[0], but I'm sure these free plans could suffer a similar
fate. With this, it's not necessarily as easy as moving mom's photo album back
to your desktop.

I know the Univeristy of Wisconsin used to roll its own email, but recently
started using Outlook acounts for everything and I'm definitely not a fan.
Migration was painful or it at least seemed so. If orgs are able to isolate
their architecture from the cloud and services, it might work out.
Unfortunately, a lot of companies and organizations treat aggregate privacy
like a preference instead of a requirement. Bartering chips.

My cynicism may be unfounded, but a company by the same name helped write the
book on fostering lock-in not too long ago.

[0] [http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/3/9662414/microsoft-
reduces-...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/3/9662414/microsoft-reduces-free-
onedrive-storage-15-to-5-gb-removes-unlimited)

