Microsoft deep

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It' s not really clear why, but sometime in the last few weeks, Microsoft cut off newbies from a program that discounts Azure 20 percent to 32 percent if the buyer committed to a certain amount of spending in a 6- or 12-month period.

The web page outlining the deal was updated to exclude new subscribers sometime after July 16, but no public announcement was made. Existing participants are unaffected.

One long-time Microsoft partner surmised that the reason could be that Microsoft does not want to promote 'shelfware' aka software that is bought and paid for but lies fallow.

'If Microsoft field sells an Azure pre-paid contract, they aren't really motivated to make sure the customer actively uses it and so drive consumption. Field sales has been told to drive utilization, not just revenue, according to this partner who requested anonymity because he works with Microsoft sales teams but is not authorized to speak about it.

I've asked Microsoft for comment but until one is forthcoming I would also guess that the round-robin discounting going on between Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services might have made this offer superfluous.

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