I find it morbidly fascinating how leadership at the same company can simultaneously believe all of "network egress is a staggeringly expensive component of data center rollout" yet "we should stream real-time input and video instead of shipping client software" and "the backend DCs to support this have to be built everywhere to reduce latency" plus "we can't bill this in any way that is correlative to our costs, because it won't make any sense to buyers", yet "we'll price it at a level that cannot possibly make sense for anyone except the most niche buyers".
Like, even at the most basic level: The kind of buyer that might be interested in this might actually be interested in something like per-minute pricing. If you only need Windows or Xbox Streaming for a few hours a month, just charge per minute. But they don't price it like that. Instead, a 2vcpu/8gb/256gb machine is $50/month. A similar machine from HP would cost, like, $400. And the best part is, if someone actually used it 8 hours per day, 20 days a month, 1080p60: That's like ~$28 in the cheapest tier of Azure bandwidth costs. And, I guess, you have to also buy a thin client device.
Just very unclear who any of these services are for.
Like, even at the most basic level: The kind of buyer that might be interested in this might actually be interested in something like per-minute pricing. If you only need Windows or Xbox Streaming for a few hours a month, just charge per minute. But they don't price it like that. Instead, a 2vcpu/8gb/256gb machine is $50/month. A similar machine from HP would cost, like, $400. And the best part is, if someone actually used it 8 hours per day, 20 days a month, 1080p60: That's like ~$28 in the cheapest tier of Azure bandwidth costs. And, I guess, you have to also buy a thin client device.
Just very unclear who any of these services are for.