Keeping It Simple

Even just ten years ago you'd have thought it crazy that we'd be talking about 12 cents an hour for a server. Last week Microsoft announced its pricing model for Windows Azure making it clear that the company will play a very aggressive role to quickly develop usage once its cloud services become available. The table below compares Microsoft Azure's pricing to Amazon's cloud computing prices. Microsoft's pricing is simpler but Amazon's pricing has two years of experience behind it which account for it being more nuanced. The two charts below compare Microsoft and Amazon pricing for data transfer out of their Clouds. Microsoft is clearly being competitive in the small to medium categories which probably is illustrative of their overall strategy.