Comment by CalRobert
3 days ago
What makes anyone start a new project and think “I know, I’ll use Azure!”? I really don’t get it. Do they have a great sales org? Is it because a phb thinks “well they made Office so it must be good”?
I interviewed with a Dutch energy company migrating infra from AWS -to- Azure and I have no idea what would make them do that (aside from inertia, but then why use Azure in the first place?)
And for some reason Azure usage is rampant in Europe.
A lot of enterprise orgs are completely helpless without Microsofts' identity solutions. That's what makes it easy to just adopt more and more Microsoft products.
In some places the purchasing decisions are not made by technical people. The infrastructure team gets azure budget and that's what they have to work with.
At my work the sales people regularly come to us with some azure discount they got offered on linkedin or some event. Luckily I have the power to tell them to fuck off.
At one startup I was in, Azure sales proactively reached out to the CEO on LinkedIn and then we were urged to swap off to it.
> What makes anyone start a new project and think “I know, I’ll use Azure!”?
Because your org is likely already paying for O365 and "Entra ID" or whatever they call it nowadays, and so it seems like this will all integrate nicely and give you a unified system with consistent identity management across all domains. It won't - omg, believe me it will NOT - but you don't find that out until it's too late.
At the startup I worked at in 2023, Azure was considered the only “safe” way to use OpenAI APIs in prod (eg agreements that the data couldn’t be used for training).
Working with Azure was one of the worst parts of that job.
The one place I worked that used it - got a bunch of free credits for signing up - had some license agreement for some Microsoft service (Teams Oath App or something similar) where a certain percentage of the infra had to be hosted on Azure
Don't remember the details of #2, just that they were a "Microsoft partner" of some sort which was beneficial to integrating with the Microsoft apps the product depended on and appearing as an app in the marketplace. The company built software that ingested IM/chat data from corporations (Teams and I think something older)
Where I live (New Zealand) Microsoft is a much larger percentage of IT infrastructure than say Bay Areas startups.
Companies are already used to working with Microsoft. Building on Microsoft's cloud feels natural.
It's CYA. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, the old saying went. And it was true. Perhaps they should have, but they weren't. Nowadays, Oracle and MS have taken that position. They have the "share of mind," a PR concept that unfortunately succinctly expresses the problem. Someone proposes MS or Oracle, and everybody nods because they've heard about it. If that causes problems, other people will have to solve them anyway.
I have literally never met a competent person who takes MS or Oracle seriously.
I confess, I'm a little salty. It's just insane how widespread Azure is when there's no obvious reason to prefer it. Of course, having the whole market be dominated by 3 giant American companies (even in Europe) is annoying in its own right.
They give free credit to startups if you fill in a few forms.
so does AWS and GCP... but pretty bad if that's the deciding criteria.
Companies coming from Active Directory and Office.
Lot of SMBs run sql server and .net
lift and shift into the cloud used to be the path of last resistance on Azure.
I work for a 300+B company that spends nearly $1b a year on AWS.
Microsoft engaged in a relentless romance campaign with our loser EVP and one of his reports for months giving him the cool LinkedIn post opportunities that weak executives crave.
Eventually he started pushing engineering to move to Azure.
We have not yet (many bullets dodged so far) but it’s there and a periodic major time sink entirely due to manipulation and flattery.
The entire “multicloud” push was a marketing effort by Microsoft to try and undermine exec faith in their “what? No, that’s a shit ton of work with zero return on investment” engineering teams.