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Microsoft Turning Screws on Customers
Mitch Wagner submitted his own story about Microsoft cracking down on big customers who it thinks aren't playing fair on their licenses. "These days, the only thing that Microsoft is interested in discussing with its customers is licensing issues," said John Luludis, CIO of Danzas AEI, an international shipping company with about 10,000 Windows desktops. "We spend a lot of time and resources constantly proving license compliance, while we try to plan an optimum configuration to deal with the rising cost of ownership related to Microsoft's products.""
Sounds like Microsoft has a long term plan to help linux out....Screw its biggest customers and make them look for alternatives.
I guess the outlook for alternative OSs and office suites is VERY good.
Anyone who has read the news about Virginia Beach Gov't should not find this surprising at all. A company wants to ensure it's licenses are being upheld.
Now, I could get into the idea that MS waited until there was ample evidence that some governments were dependant on it's products before starting this, but that would sound like a Linux zelot.
Still begs the issue, why now? Why did they not start on day one and come down on pirates? Why have there been posts on MS bulletin boards saying that they don't care if you take the OS you use at work home with you to use. Unless they knew this day would come and only now the boom is lowering.
Does this really surprise anyone? Ensure everyone is dependant on it, saturate the market, then suddenly decide to play hardball with licenses. Gee, sounds like a decent business practice, but only works if you're a monopoly.
DanH
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The problem i see with this is that doing an software licence audit has a high direct cost (time spent doing it, xeroxing of papers, etc...), and also disrups normal operation of the company.
If a software company wants to, they could audit your licence compliance monthy and put you out of business _EVEN IF YOU DON'T USE A SINGLE PIRATED PROGRAM_. The fact that they are taking a week out of every one of your months will probably kill you.
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Some of it is our fault because we trusted the wrong folks internally to keep track (long story and trust me, you don't care to hear it) but there is a lesson to be learned in making sure someone keeps track of these things. Preferably someone involved with computers...
Of course I'm having a very hard time biting my tongue about how we could avoid this problem in the future. (*cough* linux *cough*)
Our company recently recieved an intersting little letter from MS. The gist of it was "We know licensing is very important to our customers. Please let us know what we can do to help you maintain compliance."
Uh-huh. Talk about a thinly veiled threat. We had just done a software audit a couple weeks beforehand, so we were cool. But still, the damn thing read like some Mafia protection letter.
Dirk
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You ought to make that sentence more clear to people like me that have trouble reading things.
I first read it as:
"Turning Microsoft On Screws Customers"
If Microsoft accuses a company, and claims the company owns X number of licenses while the company claims it has Y number of licenses. If Microsoft forces them to an audit, and in the end, it is show that the company only owns Y number of copies with the license required, can the company sue Micro$0ft for the lost time/money in auditing, and is there a minimum amount of time Microsoft has to wait before it accuses the company again?
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If their record keeping tracks the number of (re)installs, every Win'95 machine owner must owe about a million bucks by now.
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A lot of posts on the forums here always point to "too bad we can't switch to Linux" or "We wouldn't have this problem with Linux". While I agree that Linux, or pretty much any version of Unix, is better than running M$ products, Linux is NOT ALWAYS the answer. In your case, your answer is to keep better records of your Windows licenses. I find it odd that if you're such a big company, that you don't have a site license for your workstations.
Picture putting Linux on one of your sales force's desk. They wouldn't know what to do with it. Linux (or in my case FreeBSD) is the answer for people like US. All of the techies, kernel hackers, coders and network admins that understand how to use Unix. You would spend more money retraining your people, and higher support costs running around answering questions, than you would spending to make your company M$ license compliant.
Get a site license and don't worry about it. You'll sleep better tonight.
Brad
Microsoft has been able to keep it's stock price stratospheric for years by posting record earnings. However, with slumping hardware sales, a slowing economy, lethargic adoption of Windows 2000 and Office 2000 and a emergence of a real threat on the low end server from Linux and BSD Microsoft can no longer afford to look the other way when it comes to licensing issues. Microsoft needs the revenues, and it needs them now. After all, employee options are a huge part of the average Microsoftie's employment package. If their stock doesn't go up (or worse, if it goes down), then working at Microsoft is not really that nifty a job.
In the past Microsoft realized that casual sharing of their software actually served as a very effective free advertising campaign. It helped maintain their position by making sure that their software was ubiquitous. Now that they have the market tied up, they are looking to reel in all the freeloaders.
Microsoft's plan will backfire, especially if they continue pestering companies that are honestly trying to comply.
It's not like these companies are saying, "We signed a contract saying we would pay you $500 per license, but now we're only going to pay you $100". These companies are being forced into things that they do not believe they agreed to.
.net stuff. We'll jump off that bridge when we come to it.
The biggest problem is that no two people at MS give you the same answer to the same question. I have spent many hours on the phone with MS sales people and they are in general, smart, competent folks. But one guy interprets the contract-speak one way, another sales guy interprets it another way, and I read it a completely different way. When nobody is on the same page, things get screwed up. What I'm really afriad of is how they're going to license the new
-B
I know that we keep exact records of how many licenses we have for each piece of software, and how many of those licenses are currently in use. Microsoft could walk in tomorrow and we can present the proof that we have x copies installed and we own y licenses, end of story.
Pardon me sir, Haywood Jablome here. I'm chief auditor for Microsoft, and I'm troubled by the figures you present in your analysis here. You mentioned "X copies installed and Y licenses", pointing to the fact that there is a DISCREPANCY between the number of copies installed and the number of licenses you have purchased. Please stay where you are; an auditing strike team will be arriving within 3 hours to verify that your values of X and Y are equal, or even better, that Y is greater than X.
Thank you for your time,
Heywood Jablome
Chief Auditor, Microsoft Corp.
"All your license are belong to us"
So, what do you think?
... what if there was a way for me to pay for and use my software online -- it wouldn't even be stored on my computer! Then I'd have no worries about licensing!
Gosh, these licenses sure are hard to keep track of!
Oh I know
If only Microsoft had some kind of product for me...
I work for a small city govt in southeast Texas near the Houston area, posting A/C naturally. Microsoft has accused us and about 250 other city govts in Texas of software piracy and demanded not only audits but proof of purchase for all our licenses. We are 100% compliant and even have more licenses than we have installed MS software but it is a real pain to have to drop all our present projects on hold to comply with this b.s. request. We are seriously considering treating this audit request as a request for public records under the Texas Open Records law, which states that we can charge a "fair" fee for time and materials expended in searching for and producing copies of these public records. I certainly hope that my superiors agree to go ahead and do this, it will be poetic justice in a way. On a more upbeat note, I recently heard that the City of Midland TX's city manager has told MS to go fly a kite and is refusing to comply. I think that this targeting of small, weak government organizations by MS is revenge for the US DOJ's lawsuit and breakup order.
I agree, this is a legitimate business practice, but that doesn't make it wise.
First of all, Microsoft's licensing terms and conditions are unbelievably vague, and not just for the operating system licenses, but for the applications and client access licenses as well.
Try developing a custom application using Exchange 2000, Conferencing Server, and SQL Server 2000 to be accessed by internal users, business partners, and transient consultants. Now imagine the project has a dedicated MS salesperson, and a squad of MS consultants who all have completely differing opinions on what requires a license and what does not. Now take it one step further, and imagine that someone at Microsoft thinks you're missing some licenses and demands a license audit. You spend the next two days trying to piece together what you have, what MS thinks you need, and what you really do need. It happened to my previous company, and after a week of arguing with MS were ultimately vindicated, when the know nothing in licensing was proved wrong.
Now I'm not saying that it isn't within MS's right to do so, but you should seriously consider the impact such a position will have on your customers. That situation so infuriated our CTO, that are next big _similar_ project used Domino and Sametime.
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My brother, who works as a SysAdmin at a hospital, says they used to pay for 200 licences of Word, covering the number of copies of Word being served by their Citrix servers at any one time. Microsoft recently changed the license agreement (which it can do), and now they have to buy over 1000 licences, to cover each terminal that might run Word. Furthermore, Microsoft has informed the hospital that in a few years the license will change again: they will need a license for every employee that might use Word on a terminal.
(I submitted this InternetWeek story yesterday morning and it was rejected. How come it's accepted a day late?)
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
- Custom software: Maybe companies have at least a little custom software, usually written for Windows. Some have more. Where I work we have over 3.5 million lines of COBOL code written with Microfocus extensions for Windows. You can't run that on Linux now, there is no compiler and the file formats would change, it would literally be a nightmare to switch. Sure, there's VMWare or Wine, but do you want an emulator managing your mission critical data? I'm talking all the financials, AP/AR/GL, ordering, purchasing, history, EVERYTHING. Well I don't trust it. You don't get away from this until you get to upper-mid sized companies that are using terminal emulation and a single mainframe.
- Small businesses depend on Quick Books, Peach Tree, and other "Small Business" related management software. And no, GNU Cash does not replace it. It can't even generate invoices yet.
- There isn't any decent group ware application for Linux that's not web-based. That means people will be leaving behind their Outlook/NDS/ADS/Notes stuff behind unless they licence some kind of shared server for that. You get practically no savings.
- Most companies don't need to. Lots of companies still run Win95 through 98 or NT3 to NT4. They don't plan on upgrading their Windows licences. When they buy a new computer, it will come with Windows and a new licence anyway, and they're not the type to go off building their own computers and installing OS's. There is no cost since you already payed for it.
So basically you'd need to be a company that only used your computer for web/mail and office, then you might have a relatively smooth transition. Don't forget though, people use windows at home too, and they are familiar with it's tools. Just because Star Office looks similar to word doesn't mean it's the same. There will be things people can't figure out and there will be retraining.As far as your 10,000 user example, I wouldn't want to retraing 10,000 users for anything.
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these are the reasons I think EULA's are not legal:
They're not avaliable prior to purchase.
No retailer allows the return of software if you don't like the license.
If a retailer *DID* allow the return, MS should bare the cost of that return (restocking fees, shipping etc), but they don't.
A contract is an agreement between two parties ... usually both parties recieve some benifit from the contract ... in the EULA, theres no agreement its "take it or leave it." And the Eula provides no benifit (IE waranty, fitness of purpose) and seeks only to benifit the software company.
Last but not least, a legally enforcable contract has to have a minimum of 3 signatures, the notary and the two parties ... The notary serves several purposes -- she authenticates both parties, can be called upon in a legal dispute, and establishes that both parties are aware of the contents of the contract, which I believe is called [IANAL] "communication." It is my belief that "press f8 to continue" [NT4 installer] is not a sufficent "notary". Can you prove I read and understood the entire agreement then pressed f8 ?
What if I gave someone 5 bucks to install a MS os on my machine ... would I be then bound by the EULA ? I didn't agree to it, someone else did ... is this situation is analgous to purchasing a computer with preinstalled software?
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Instead, go download Sybase 11.0.3.3 for Linux or FreeBSD. It works just the same, and it is free for almost all commercial use.
MS SQL server and Sybase were once the same product. MS ODBC drivers work with Sybase, and the SQL syntax is pretty much identical.
If you need support, just upgrade. No, you aren't buying a product with the spectacular benchmarks of SQL Server 2000, but then again, you aren't buying anything at all, so why complain?