[827a]

I find it morbidly fascinating how leadership at the same company can simultaneously believe all of "network egress is a staggeringly expensive component of data center rollout" yet "we should stream real-time input and video instead of shipping client software" and "the backend DCs to support this have to be built everywhere to reduce latency" plus "we can't bill this in any way that is correlative to our costs, because it won't make any sense to buyers", yet "we'll price it at a level that cannot possibly make sense for anyone except the most niche buyers".

Like, even at the most basic level: The kind of buyer that might be interested in this might actually be interested in something like per-minute pricing. If you only need Windows or Xbox Streaming for a few hours a month, just charge per minute. But they don't price it like that. Instead, a 2vcpu/8gb/256gb machine is $50/month. A similar machine from HP would cost, like, $400. And the best part is, if someone actually used it 8 hours per day, 20 days a month, 1080p60: That's like ~$28 in the cheapest tier of Azure bandwidth costs. And, I guess, you have to also buy a thin client device.

Just very unclear who any of these services are for.

[giancarlostoro]

Remember when Google did this and it failed because PC gamers dont want 1700 stores for games. They just want Steam or GOG.

These companies do not know their customer base and it costs them.

I do see these devices making way more sense for enterprise on the other hand, to the dismay of many. But for the average consumer maybe not. I assume they are going to recycle the same tech they are using to let you stream Xbox games.

If Windows wasnt so damned bloated this wouldnt cost them much. Every Windows laptop that was nearing its end of life became magically better and still in my house all 15 years later after I installed Linux. Wild.

[yyyk]

Google failed with Stadia because no sane AAA company would want to risk App/Play Store terms. The offering maybe made sense for A companies, but Google's requirements were too much for them (their marketing certain wasn't there). Google ended up subsidizing a few AAA companies, and then it fell to typical Google kill-it-now cost cutting. Microsoft has existing relationships and won't have this problem.

[ThrowawayB7]

The fine article plainly says that these are for corporate use and that the service it is meant to connect to isn't even available to regular consumers. And this is hardly a new concept: even a casual search shows that Windows thin clients have existed since the '90s and that the previous models are still currently being sold by various OEMs.

[Spivak]

I mean GeForce Now is still going and PS+ streaming is surprisingly playable.

I think people just didn't want Google.

[chronc2739]

> how leadership at the same company can simultaneously believe all of "network egress is a staggeringly expensive component of data center rollout" yet "we should stream real-time input and video instead of shipping client software"

The leadership doesn’t believe egress is expensive.

And neither do the customers believe it.

However the customers are okay paying the egress price. So it stays, regardless of what leadership or customers say.

[AlotOfReading]

Are you suggesting that low latency video isn't expensive? That goes against everything I've ever heard from people at streaming platforms. The costs are high enough to be a major competitive moat for some of the biggest companies on the planet (e.g. Google's YouTube).

[kuerbel]

20/40/70 GB of outbound data is included, depending on the tier.

But you need to meet pretty high licensing requirements, e.g. for enterprise:

Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Microsoft 365 F3, Microsoft 365 E3, and Microsoft 365 E5, including versions of these suites that do not include Microsoft Teams, as well as Microsoft 365 A3, Microsoft 365 A5, and Microsoft 365 Education Student Use Benefit.

Which means around 20€ per month for business premium. They are also managed in intune, so you need someone with intune expertise.

[onion2k]

And InTune needs user's to put Edge on their devices, which means a significant set of users will just give up being able to open links on their phone from work apps. That puts a drag on productivity which is definitely more costly than 20€ per month.

[madduci]

You don't account the "reliability" of cloud. What if Azure goes dark?

[locknitpicker]

> Just very unclear who any of these services are for.

These services are for Microsoft, to serve Microsoft's business needs at the customer's expenses.

Look at Azure and how it designed it's products around the concept of accounts. Azure is supposed to be a cloud provider but their offering is built around charging customers for provisioning dedicated hardware that users then can run their apps on.

Even their function-as-a-service offer requires you to pay por the dedicated hardware where to deploy your event handlers.

If you look at Azure as Active Directory/Entra ID attracting and locking in enterprise accounts, you start to see these service account products as a way to price gouge customers. You have customers locked in with the auth system who then have to manage competing pressures such as "I need to keep my azure resources independent of other teams/projects" and "why do I need to pay 100$/month for a dedicated app service plan with two cores if all I want is a small internal app that might run the occasional background job"