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Comment by dantiberian | Hacker News Reader

Steve Martin comes off as oddly defensive when announcing these changes

  I’ve yet to meet a developer who travels just to hear about pricing updates,
  so you won’t see us take the stage at Build and use the opening moment 
  to announce a price cut. This isn’t retail; innovation matters. 
  I’ll cover pricing right here, right now.

I'm not sure what purpose it serves except for making a stab at Amazon and Google.

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That's a very cynical position to take. For once, here is a large market player focussing on providing delivering value via the product and not wasting time on pricing. In many cases, even with these price reductions (and their claim to match AWS/GCE), pricing is not the driver for hosting adoption - rather features, ease of use, performance etc. It is refreshing to see one of the big boys elevate this.

It does set a high benchmark for what they are presenting: saying they have big innovation to announce ... and then not deliver ...

I think he makes a valid point, why waste keynote time on prices? I'd much rather hear about the innovation.

It's a valid point but phrased oddly. He could have said something like:

"We have so much amazing stuff to tell you at Build that we won't have time to cover price drops on Azure. Effective May 1 ..."

What he means is: "we weren't expecting the Google and Amazon price cuts, so we aren't going to change our carefully planned keynote to announce this."

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