MS releases Windows 365 Pricing

[Marzipan]

Microsoft's Windows 365 Cloud PC service will range from $20 to $162 per user per month

Microsoft's Windows 365 Cloud PC service is now generally available, and pricing is public. The service will cost users anywhere between $20 to $162 per user per month, based on cores, RAM and storage.

www.zdnet.com

it's not cheap, but the article says to compare pricing against AWS, where savings may be available.

Windows 365 Business is for organizations with 300 or less employees while Enterprise is for those with more.

Windows 365 Plans and Pricing | Microsoft

Discover which Windows 365 plan is right for your organization.

www.microsoft.com

 

[clshades]

I'm only paying around 11 bux a month... not sure what's gonna happen.

 

[crazyea]

Will a business save money with those kind of prices? Especially when they need a pc to start with.

 

[moocow]

$20 / user / month for single core, 2GB of RAM, and 64 GB of storage? If you run a web app, the browser eats 4GB just sitting there.

 

[Marzipan]

Will a business save money with those kind of prices? Especially when they need a pc to start with.

time will tell. a monthly fee may be much easier to write off than hardware and depreciation...plus the potential for better security may be worth the premium as a desktop with 4 cores, 16GB of RAM and 256GB SSD will be a lot less than the $1200 in subscription fees.

 

[ipaine]

Having had to deal with getting people to sign off on things I can say this, single one time purchases are way easier to sell to management than recurring costs.

I mean sure this has some advantages, but if you need someone to be mobile then laptops work. And really the top tier offering costs $234.50/month and gets you 8 core 32gb ram and 512gb storage. One year of that kind of pricing will buy something significantly more powerful and something that doesn't rely on internet being up 100% of the time.

Now maybe if you can swing a deal and get really cheap dumb terminals then maybe it might be worth it.

 

[sswilson]

Isn't the main point here that it's a virtual PC which can be accessed from anywhere with whatever hardware is on hand, and will always be configured / outfitted exactly the same way?

I'm not sure I see much value in that (vs issuing a laptop) but the core idea seems more like an extension of the corporate desktop than a hardware replacement.

 

[Marzipan]

HaaaH! MS says demand was unbelievable so they have had to cancel the two month demo offer as the resources allocated were overwhelmed. the caveat? it's okay to pay for an instance if you want to test still.

Microsoft just paused its free trial of Windows 365 because of 'unbelievable' demand

Microsoft halts two-month Windows 365 trials until it provisions more capacity to support them. In the meantime, it says users can buy it if they want to try it.

www.zdnet.com

 

[moocow]

I think there's some value in remote access a personalized desktop. My company deals with sensitive data and before COVID actually prefer no WFH. In such case, having someone log in remotely to a controlled environment and lock down how data is copied is actually a good idea.

 

[JD]

I think there's some value in remote access a personalized desktop. My company deals with sensitive data and before COVID actually prefer no WFH. In such case, having someone log in remotely to a controlled environment and lock down how data is copied is actually a good idea.

I think this is Microsoft's attempt to get people away from Citrix, by offering a "fully managed" solution. Everyone is moving towards SaaS or IaaS these days.

This makes it a whole lot easier to understand where your data is and what security it has. If users lose their "thin client", be it a laptop, tablet, etc, no data is lost then if it's all in this Virtual Desktop. No need to report it to RCMP or other government agencies either, in the case of PCI/PAN data on said device.