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Comment by raesene9 | Hacker News Reader

Personally I'd say that Office365 revenue is great revenue, as it's recurring and has good lock-in.

MS have wanted to get people onto subscription style licensing for a long time now (since at least the software assurance days) as it's predictable and repeating revenue.

The other element is the one you point out, companies that move to Office365 are more likely to choose Azure over AWS as there are synergies (like being able to us Azure AD for both) which make it a good idea.

The growth in cloud probably has a way to run as more companies come up to renew products and servers and move them to the cloud.

With Apple I guess the forward picture is more tricky. Their main hardware markets are a) getting saturated and b) getting more comptetive

For services, I'm not sure they have as great a story. I use iCloud as it works well with my iDevices but I'm not that wedded to it.

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Personally I'd say that Office365 revenue is great revenue, as it's recurring and has good lock-in.

It is but calling it cloud revenue is a bit of a stretch, I don't know why they are being dishonest about it.

CIO's love calling Office365 "cloud" and "digital transformation"

Right...

Why? It's hosted sharepoint and exchange and lync and active directory, AND development of sharepoint and exchange and lync and active directory. It's not just buying hosting from rackspace.

Office 365, OWA, SharePoint Online/OneDrive, AD, and Teams (VoIP) are absolutely a cloud service.

Exactly. Everyone reads "Office 365" and think that it only means Word/Excel/Powerpoint, when it actually includes Sharepoint and Exchange as well as OneDrive.

The cost and support savings for enterprises going from on-prem to cloud with stuff like Sharepoint can be huge. And Microsoft, for all its faults, understands the enterprise market in a way that Google and Apple definitely don't. I think Amazon has a better understanding of enterprise customers but they don't have the product offering to rival what Microsoft brings to the game. And because of the synergies Microsoft can offer, they can eat into the pie of other companies like Salesforce. Dynamics CRM isn't as good as Salesforce but it's easier to justify if you've already bought into the rest of the Office365 ecosystem.

I think Microsoft is poised for serious growth with their cloud offerings that is going to drive strong stock price growth for years to come.

that was the case before the "cloud" too

cloud removes the friction. reserve a license, apply it to an account, they now have instant access to a "Project Server" or a "Dynamics Server" all within an hour.

Couldn't have written it better. Before the synergy was there because of the way Microsoft bundled licenses of their products. But you still had the hurdle of deployment and support of the on-prem products, which meant you had to either hire or allocate staff to administer those products.

Now that additional staff cost is gone, and stuff can be provisioned in no time at all.

that is not a change on the product. but on the client expectation.

We are talking about the Decision to go with microsoft or not today.

In the past clients would always deal with on-prem installs. But picking ActiveDir and Exchange was decided on their need of office.

Today, clients expect to create account, deal with SSO if they are big and that is it. Now picking microsoft offerings is still based on their need of Office.

It is all the same picture.

>when it actually includes Sharepoint and Exchange as well as OneDrive.

onedrive for business is sharepoint.

OneDrive (formerly Live Mesh) is also a piece of software, a client windows, mobile, and web app. The mobile and windows apps SYNC data from SharePoint to either File Explorer or store it in the mobile app itself, for offline viewing.

As a user, I absolutely love MS Teams... it runs everywhere (as an Electron app) so I can use it on my hackintosh, android phone, laptop at work, etc. I can get on a voip meeting anywhere (issues getting my car to sync properly not withstanding). Totally replaces lync/skype imho.

OWA is okay, and I understand the changes in Outlook proper to be closer to that, and I know the reasons why (eventually consistent backend), but the Outlook app experience is a bit jarring on some instances, but getting better again.

I don't use Sharepoint (except via Teams' wiki) and don't use OneDrive much, but others in our org definitely do.

For any business with even a dozen employees on computers, Office 365 is definitely worth the cost of entry over trying to maintain those kinds of things internally. No affiliation with MS, and don't even run Windows where I don't have to, just appreciate the services for what they are.

I do wish that google would step up here a bit more, their solution is just so disjointed by comparison, and it's like they've got an identity crisis. MS totally leapfrogged them in terms of online document/mail solutions for business.

I would like to see better identity integration for Azure/AD with Apple and Linux desktops. Most of my experience with macbooks is middling to horrible, and Linux hasn't been a laptop/desktop option in any workplace I've been in using AD, which would be my first preference.

you dont store any files in the Teams files tab? Just chat and meetings?

If you store word, excel, powerpoint documents elsewhere than SharePoint, and your storage doesnt have versioning, its definitely worth moving your data over.

Yeah... sorry, I just don't think of it that way... I typically don't think of the wiki integration as Sharepoint either, just know that it is.

As for files, for a lot of them, I use VSTS/Git for them a lot of the time. The PMs use it in teams more.

They've been for a long time. It's a way to tell cloud customers: "we're catching up with AWS, don't worry".

It's malpractice, but still legal.

that's pure developer's prospect. For the users, Office 365 is cloud product which they daily used. Otherwise, how would you call Dropbox/Box a cloud provider?

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