alt Hacker NewsWhat 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Companies coming from Active Directory and Office.
They give free credit to startups if you fill in a few forms.
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.
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.