Machiavellian said:
You must remember that there is a difference between profit and cost. The cost for MS to distribute processing to a certain number of virtual servers compared to the profit margin they get for such resources when selling it as a profit. The gain for MS is to get as many customers using Azure as possible and getting them tightly integrated with its services. There will be aspect to this business plan which will require them to give away resources for free to get more subscription subs. Phil made a tweet that we will be seeing more on this tech as well as the demo is not a throw away piece but could represent something larger that they are doing. What I am guess we will see is how MS will monetize their platform which may not mean charging customers but instead getting developers, Publishers and other content providers on Azure which would pay for their cloud compute on the customer end. I am also sure MS is looking to get a good percentage of XBL Gold subs which also goes along the cost of providing the service. The thing for MS is that they have paid for the servers and infrastructure. They are not renting, they are the provider so cost of resources can be balanced with cost of usage. Another thing that is not know is how MS is spreading the work amoung multiple servers. I hope we get more technical detail on the process as I am interested in some of the problems MS must face with delivering this tech. |
I don't know, that doesn't really convince me. Sure, Microsoft could sell cloud computing resources so cheap that they're actually making a loss, to attract new customers etc. They could cross-finance etc. etc. But those are not sustainable solutions. In the end, someone has to pay for the costs. If someone wants to to use the processing power equivalent of 16 high-end PCs, 40 Xbox Ones or whatever, someone has to pay for that.
In a few years from now, it will probably be like this: Video game consoles will indeed be hardly more than very simple and cheap streaming devices, with pretty much all processing being done in the cloud - and people will pay different amounts of money depending on how good they want the graphics quality to be, maybe something like "2 Cents per minute for Xbox 360-quality graphics, 2 dollars per minute for raytracing quality graphics in 4K resolution"