Compute vs Computer

Dear Microsoft, the sales description of your pricing model sucks. KTHXBAI.

Yes - thanks for the free 24 hours, which reduces your monthly bill by a whopping 3%, but only for your first use. Not because I've used the computed time, no, because I've used the time of the computer to do no computation.

Why should I be surprised, this is standard cloud-style provisioning? Well, not quite. Firstly the sales pitch indicates all the way through that it is the use of compute time, not computer time - and the cost calculator seemed to confirm this. Secondly, every single deployment, staged & production counts as a computer time - you cannot scale up within a computer to maximise the available compute time, and that is where I believe it differs from the standard. Each application you want to use on the cloud - regardless of usage patterns or footprint will cost a pretty hefty amount, and only the first deployment or the first application will see the free hours. So do we end up bundling everything into a single stupidly weighty and CPU intensive application just to avoid the cost?

Great - how about load/unload at point of use? Yeah - awesome for a web application, no thanks.

OK, so they're not aiming at hobbyist programmers? Sure, fine, I'll also heartily not recommend them to my current or future employers now... and I'm sure they'll be cowering in their boots for that. Yeah, pow, take that big corporation, woo!

It doesn't seem to sit easily with them opening up free versions of Visual Studio for web development, and trying to encourage an uptake there. Sure, you can develop for free and it's great - but surely you wouldn't want to use it anywhere, like on the web, would you?

And I was happy to pay them for hosting my hobby work, the costs didn't look unreasonable for similar packages available, it could be useful and would certainly put me closer to the "development edge". But, no, not now - the costs of what I'd like to do would be completely uncompetitive compared to other packages.

I await the chimes of "should use LAMP" - which naturally misses the point, so don't bother.

On the plus side, IIS6 and ASP.NET MVC - yay, they really hate each other too.

Happy times.