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New Microsoft Feature: Planned Obsolescence
Ryu2 writes: "According to this CNet story, Microsoft is thinking of from its current "perpetual" license scheme to a three-year contract for its enterprise customers, and most of its software. After the three years are up, customers have to pay up again or stop using the software. While the issue of subscriptions has come up before, this seems to imply that Microsoft is abandoning the traditional time-unlimited license altogether. With them setting the precendent, for good or for ill, for many things in the software industry, if this takes hold, how long will it be until every other business software firm jumps on this bandwagon?"
Grammar Nazi, save us from the hideous sentance structure!
Give me a break, other than the OS, licenses for commercial UNIX software is on the most part WAY more expensive than its windows counterpart. The open source world can't even come close to providing real corporate applications such as CAD and structural analysis, and slews of other engineering apps.
Go price the unix and windows versions of something like Cadence, the price difference will be enough to put windows and office on every pc in the dept.
But then again, I'm no expert on MS or .NET
You misunderstand what Open Source is about. Its not about fixing something for free for people who can well afford it.
It is about allowing anyone capable to pitch for the contract to do what you suggest. It creates a truely Free Market. Building a corporate desktop Linux would be like walking into a bank and _giving_ them your hard earned. Insane, these are the people who could have paid you already.
It the CitiBanks and E&Ys of the world think they are paying too much, they will look into their options, they probably already have, and people like LinuxCare probably had them as their target market but it doesn't seem to be working as planned just yet.
World Domination will happen anyway, lets at least help those who need it before those who don't.
>>>My experience has been that companies would rather standardize and leave it be. You mention 40% of businesses use Office 2k; that means that 60% don't want to upgrade.
No, all that means is 60% of them have not chosen to upgrade. I haven't chosen to have wild, flagrant intercourse with supermodels, that doesn't mean *I* don't want to.
This is actually commonplace in the EDA SW industry. In fact, I can't think of a single piece of software we use for chip design that is "buy once, run forever". This is the way things have been done for at least the last several years, probably a lot more.
The general computing public in my neighborhood routinely loans and borrows software back and forth, same as garden & workshop tools.
I'm out of that cycle, since it's almost all Windows stuff getting swapped, but how the heck are Microsoft or Adobe going to keep people from being friendly, which is all the locals figure they're doing when they let a neighbor use their copy of whatever?
- Robin
hawk
In 3 years, Linux and the various free projects will supposedly be ready to replace all of MS's software. So you can tell the salesperson, "Three years is fine; I'm planning to switch to Linux then anyway."
Well, this should be a good thing if not a great thing for competitors within Open Source. If most of the software world follows this new tradition then the enterprise will be easier for Linux considering the GPL gives the freedom back to the consumer.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
My understanding about Y2k was that the reason alot of seemingly Y2k-uncompliant systems were being overhauled was because no one really wanted to touch them. If they were working and doing the stuff you wanted them to, why change a good thing? It would be really expensive to move your operations over to a newer platform and reengineer all your business logic to that platform.
In my org (we use NT Domain auth) I'm pretty sure we still use NT as the DC platform. It works (since I'm able to log in every day) and there's no reason to touch it. Using a subscription model potentially means an org has to reeng alot of systems and bring on expensive hired guns to make that transition.
Someone mentioned how some businesses might like to take small hits rather than one large one - they will STILL take that one large hit but just from a different angle. And the transition won't be entirely smooth. Just ask developers who have to port their VB6 apps over to VB.Net.
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
Oh no, not another useless car analogy. Let's face some facts here: Microsoft has always complained that UNIX is stagnant and old. There is a reason they think it is: it's pretty much done, and only needs minor tweaking now. All GUI/Desktop garbage aside, the OS itself is only changing to handle enterprise-class and embedded-clss hardware. Basic things like USB or Firewire support are simply extension to already-proven technologies. Windows 2000 is the penultimate version of Windows; they may need to tag on a new style of bus in the future or even make it scale up to 4096 processors someday -- but it's basically done.
Car analogies only serve to intentionally confuse the issue; people aren't going to buy or care or even know what operating system they're using in 50 years. Microsoft knows this, hence their new license confusion and open-source FUD campaign.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Not quite. Cars today are so much better than they were just 20 years ago that getting a new one makes loads of sense.
And that's the bottom line. :-)
That is completely Not True -
You are leagally protected to sell anything you OWN - INCLUDING Software. It's called the right of second sale and NOTHING in a Copyright License can inhibit it.
And I really don't apreciate you putting out misinformation like this. It feeds on itself.
The reason you can't sell it is because MS makes sure every computer has a copy preinstalled - preventing a second sales market.
>>
http://www.mrbrklyn.com/amsterdam.html http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Enlightenment? You must be insane. Window Maker is far more professional-looking and far less CPU intensive.
I always throught that MS's ever-changing document file formats are a result of competition with Wordperfect, not planned obsolescence. Looking back, now I'm thinking you might be right and it's a combination of the two...
is SOOOOO much better than 98 or NT. As a corp desktop supporter, 3 years on an OS is 1 year longer than the life span of the PC and completely redundant. Here, at a large IT facility we replace every desktop on a 2year cycle, and the OS is a site license and installed from an image anyways. Once on the network software is 'pushed' to keep the app's current.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
and some games are THE ONLY licensed software I run :).
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
If software continues to work, and does the job required, why does it need to be depreciated and, eventually, written off.
The greedier and more visibly desperate M$ gets, the better the alternatives look.
If you've got a lot of legacy hardware, Linux is the way to go. If not OS X may be your best bet.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
It worked out well for CA as well.
At a former employer, we used to use a couple of products that originally came from Digital but the package was sold to CA (during the Palmer fire sale regime). One package had it license fees shoot up by nearly 500%. We stopped using that package and a homegrown replacement found its way into use (wasn't as ``pretty'' though.) Another went to an annual license fee. Well, Y2K hit and the version we were running wasn't Y2K compliant. That was the excuse I needed to stop using that package too. After doing a little investigation it seems I could emulate the features that we actually used using a Perl script that took all of about 20 minutes to write. When will these companies learn that we're not in business to send them money; make a better product and we'll buy it.
Where does Microsoft obtain all the guns it uses to shoot itself in the foot? And aren't their feet starting to look like Swiss cheese by now? Keep it up and you'll have the sort of customer loyalty that CA earned. (What did that old magazine review say about it? Oh yah: ``Dead last... with a bullet''.)
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I take it that by ``corporate applications'' you mean those that you spend too much money on or those that come in glossy boxes. You've, obviously, never heard of the NASA's COSMIC software library that used to be administered by the University of Georgia. For the cost of distribution, like the FSF, you could obtain applications of the sort you listed... with source code. UofG doesn't do the distribution any more but it's been taken over by Open Channel Software and can be found at http://www.openchannelfoundation.org/cosmic/. You can even ``adopt'' an application and get involved in the development of enhancements. Another potential source is the DECUS software archive (now called `Encompass'); there's a slew of software available. A lot of it's systems management related utilities but the semi-annual symposium collections used to contain a bunch of gems that we found useful. And I sure hope you know about the FTP archives on ibiblio. Of course, if what one's really looking for in a ``corporate application'' is someone to sue, I suppose these won't fit their needs.
I will agree with you that many commercial packages for UNIX cost more than they should. But to say imply that there aren't more cost effective solutions, and are open source to boot (no pun intended), is just naive.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
No, the copyright of the original author has been violated. That is not, and has never been, "stealing". Stealing is not the same as depriving someone of potential income.
Disclaimer: IANAL. I have also never used Napster, so don't accuse me of being a thieving college student.
Solution: instead of 3.11, use NT 3.51 - like Win 3.1 but stable (more stable than NT 4, because they didn't put the graphics subsystem in the kernel).
Added bonus: almost all Win32 apps work just fine on it. Put suitable NT4 DLLs in the app's home directory if you have problems.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Hmmmm. Lets see. Wasn't there a little skirmish based on this same theme -- a monarchy taxing the subjects to death.
What's the difference here? Paying twice for the software (or in their eyes, the rights to use the software). Either way, its a double taxation redux.
-Wes Yates
The Woolsey-Swanson Rule
People would rather live with a problem they cannot solve than accept a problem they do not understand.
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
This is nothing new.. There are many different pieces of software that are based on a yearly "subscription" usually in the form of a required support fee. I have to deal with several pieces of software like that. One that comes to mind is Checkpoint Firewall-1.... Oh, how I so wish I could replace that evil beast with linux.. However, convincing the head of the IT deparment is rather difficult on that one..
Nah, you won't have to upgrade after three years. You will simply have to pay again for what you already paid for three years earlier. Plus accept that they do not support your preferred old software anymore.
Ideal for MS, 'money for nothing'.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
You poor addicted sould.
What do you mean, "new"?
I think MS has enough of a track record of breaking compatibility between versions of eg Office, to justify viewing this as just the next logical step.
Sure, at the moment we don't have to upgrade our version of Office - but new PCs come with the latest version, and our clients are using it, so we effectively do have to upgrade.
Saying "I'm sorry, could you resend that as Word 95 format please?" isn't an option with some clients.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
This is definitely true in the UNIX world still. Not just Oracle. A *lot* of EDA tools for ASIC design require annual 'maintenence' contracts in addition to the initial licence fee. Synopsys is somewhere around $100k a license, plus $25k/year in 'maintenence'. Of course, if you're having trouble, you can generally get a field engineer (who, low and behold, will possess a degree in engineering from an accredited school) to help you out. But it still is exhorbitant. There far more egregious (sic) examples in terms of the maintenence fee - not the price, Synopsys has just about everyone beat on that, but in terms of what you get. Sometimes you pay the fee but get *no* support. So Microsoft's turn is nothing new. It's just new to the commodity software world.
... well, even with this licensing model they still have to worry about migrating and so forth --- MS is not saying that they'll provide IS services for those companies, just that they get to pay every X years even though those companies didn't upgrade.
Before PCs, software was licensed with an annual fee. IBM had elaborate price lists for all kinds of software you could add from sort programs to programming languages. Any companyies tended to buy the licenses.
When PCs came along, (a) you couldn't trust the date on the computer because anyone could change it and (b) the users wouldn't put up with it.
That didn't stop companies like SAS witha a big mainframe/Unix presence to have the same kind of licensing on PCs.
In the Unix world, it was high software license fees that drove people to write free software. But there were still packages that use/used flexlm (one of the most common license managers) to have an annual fee licensing structure.
Frankly, most people won't pay annual renewals. Maybe Office comes bundled with their PC. After a year, they get an email. Pay up or the software won't work. Most people don't use the Office that's bundled and they'll say "Screw this." and let it expire.
Corporations are already amortizing their software cost over 3 years, so they'll compare the annual cost to the annual amortization and they'll probably pay. But they will install controls to make sure they don't pay for a single copy more than is needed.
In the long run, annual licensing models help free software because people have an ongoing incentive to find a free package that meets their needs.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Maybe this strategy is simply putting into words what they already do, so the IT managers can't refer to it as a MicroScam anymore.
What can you legally sell a used copy of MS Windows for? That's right boys and girls, you can't legally sell it at all, it has ZERO value!
Maybe if you live in a UCITA state, or have some signed agreement between you and MS. But for shrinkwraped software, first sale applies and I can sell my copy for however damn much I want. I could go on ebay (before they bent over for MS anyway) and sell my copy of Win98 for a million dollars to some sap and it would be perfectly legal.
I can't sell copies of my Win98 cd, but I can sell my copy that I own.
IANATA (I am not a tax attorney), but I read something on the desk of a tax attorney recently. I forget what jurisdiction this was in, but software was only considered an asset for taxation purposes if it was "operating software"
Big difference...
:) I'd rather work on a '57 Chevy than anything newer...
Cars wear out. The gubbermint implements new emission and safety standards. Gas prices triple suddenly.
But having said that, I've got to agree with you.
Mainframes have always operated with this kind of license. What's more, the more CPU the machine has the more the software costs. This allowed smaller customers to afford the software and push the cost onto bigger customers. The funny thing is that if you run Linux on S/390 they follow traditional client-server licensing (a flat charge per CPU).
While I agree that it's a pain to rent software it does have some good points in a corporate environment.
1.) It forces upgrades. You don't need to worry about that one person running WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS or that ancient copy of AutoCad. Old version of the software typically can't be licensed so you are forced to upgrade.
2.) On mainframe software the support comes with the license so getting support is easy. They want you to continue to pay so they are responsive (usually).
3.) Since upgrades will be foced every few years everyone will need a new PC every few years because MS Office will continue to expand to fill up all available hard disk space and memory. That means there will be a flood of old PCs which will run Linux just fine.
4.) It makes a "free" operating system that much more attractive.
5.) It gurantees MS a constant stream of revenue.
I doubt the average home user would appreciate it and I don't think most companies would swallow it either unless it saves them money in the long run. MS Office may be the leader, but there are other products which can perform the same basic functions that 90% of the population uses.
Microsoft is threatening its developers with random audits for commercial use of MSDN software. MS has always been good to their developers and they must need revenue pretty bad to risk alienating them.
m l
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/18785.ht
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
I'm not surprised that M$ are planning to introduce planned obsolescence. But there's no need to bash M$ specifically over this. Other companies have been doing it for years.
Consider:
* Incandescent light globes/bulbs typically have a 1,000 hour lifetime. However, it is possible to make them last much longer. Most wear on incandescent globes happens when they are switched on and the current surges through it. If the initial current pulse was slowed, the globe would last much longer. This isn't done because the manufacturers would sell less globes and hence make less money.
* Modern cars are designed with "crumple zones". These crumple zones are areas like the panels and the like. Repairing modern cars after an accident can be very expensive. Modern cars have been known to be written off after a collision in a car park at speeds under 20 km/h.
* Most electronic equipment is built so that if it breaks down, the cost of repair is often greater than the cost of replacement. A lot of devices like VCR's have plastic gears and cogs. These limit the lifetime of the device and mandate regular replacement.
* Old car batteries used to last 15 years or more. Now they are designed so they have a limited lifetime, typically 3 to 5 years.
So why is M$ any different to any other corporation seeking to maximise profits by any legal means available?
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
The general scheme was
price = product_base * machine_speed * number_of_users * how_long_do_you_want_it
The only news regarding MS adopting the plan is -
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> No matter what the population here thinks, M$ will still keep the ajority of its (l)users. ostly because people are to ignorant to see that this suscription based software isn't worth it.
What's happening there, boiscout? Did you forget to pay the rent on your m key?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
M$ wants you to pay no matter WHAT you do..
The funny thing is this....
Microsoft was perfectly happy with their licensing scheme until this year. We pay site licensing (or whatever the MS speek is for it.) for our Windows and Office. We pay these yearly etc... This year, with no money in the budget for new PC's, employees, or anything else, we cut our site licensing agreement.
The MS rep said "You can't do this!" and I said yes I can son, I own them there copies of Win2k. I'm sure we are not the only people to think of this...
We are just now doing a site wide client migration to Win2k from Win95. You can laugh, but all of our vendors only support a Win95 client. (How will 3 year licensing affect this??)
The truth of this is that solution providers will look for more stable clients to work with. And this will hurt Microsoft. Most of our providers are none too happy with Windows connectivity, DB access, stability, etc... Now tell them they have to re-certify their Client OS every 3 years, and then get all of their clients to upgrade, verify the server still works with the latest version.... Egad, what a nightmare.
We have a 20 year old Sun OS 3.5 that made it past Y2K working with 6 year old clients. I also have a 5 year old Solaris system that we expect another 15 years of service from. A 12 year old AIX box, etc... Still running the OS they came with. Mircosoft might like to know that some of our machines still use DOS 6.2, BY DESIGN!
With the new MS plan, I would have to upgrade all of these machines to use new hardware, new drivers, etc... What about support for legacy cards, like the Core Logix A/D to D/A converters?? Will Bill gates write me a driver??
MR. Gates, that gun is pointing right at your foot...
~Hammy
Assuming that the status quo is purchasing software = license for perpetuity, there are two major bandwagons onto which organizations can try to jump:
Ultimately, though, the choice won't be made by the organizations offering the software; the choice will be made by the organizations purchasing the software (or time-limited licences for the software, as the case may be).
So if you sign on for 3 years or 5 years, that is the price you pay. So that is a constant, wouldn't you agree?
Yes it is, but so is the price you pay upfront to "own" software forever. You were claiming that renting software gives you *more* predictability -- well, no, it gives you exactly the same predictability as buying.
But the major hassle, co-ordinating a huge upgrade over hundreds or thousands of machines is eliminated at least in part by the subscription
I don't think so. What will happen is that MS will just send you a CD for a network install and you have to do all the work yourself anyway. You still have to admin/manage everything -- all we are talking about is payment terms for software, nothing else. How I pay for software has no relationship to the ease of using/upgrading it.
Yes, it is. For the same reason that people will pay $150k for a $125k house over the course of 30 years
OK, let's see. Let's whip out my Excel and calculate the implied interest rate. We have a $2,500 value that I pay off by making monthly payments of $100 for three years... That's 2.12% monthly, which means an annualized interest rate of slightly over 25%. Still think it's a good deal? Even borrowing from credit cards makes more sense...
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
No, I disagree. See, if you rent, then the idea is that you get upgrades included
;-). Besides, it's a question of the absolute amount: I'll pay an extra quarter for a convenient can of Pepsi without thinking, but I will not pay extra thousands of dollars without checking carefully if I can get it cheaper.
Point taken.
Still, keep in mind that for major pieces of software like Office, the next-version-release-dates are generally known a year or two in advance. MS software release cycle is quite predictable all by itself.
typically people pay a big premium for conveince
People do, but CFOs of corporations are not really people
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The cost of software can be easily predicted
How come? Unless MS gives you guarantees about pricing for many years down the road (highly unlikely) you have exactly the same predicting power.
Buy: Pay a chunk now, amortize it over three years, do it again at unknown cost.
Rent: Pay monthly over three years, do it again at unknown cost.
they won't have to worry about deploying/managing updates and upgrades
They do. First of all, they'll have to deal with security patches. Second, once three years are over and a new version comes in, who do you think will have to deal with data migration and untangling these little clever hacks that users wrote using the suddenly-not-supported-any-more features?
Getting the latest (or any version) is going to cost $2500. Thats a big expenditure. Now, instead of paying for it all at once, maybe it'd be nice for them to pay $75/month for three years. That'd work out better for a huge majority of customers
In one way, yes. It's always better to pay later than to pay early. In your scheme MS is basically giving everybody a three-year interest-free loan.
On the other hand, the choice disappears: maybe after three years I am in a bad financial shape. Under the 'buy' model my operating costs for software are zero. Under the 'rent' model, my operating costs are determined by MS.
Even if its more than that, say $100/month, its a deal for most customers
It is? 100 x 36 = $3,600. You mean instead of paying $2,500 to use something forever I get to pay $3,600 to use exactly the same thing for 3 years and that's a good deal???!
Thank you, I'll pass.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I'm not sure what Microsoft thinks it has to gain. All kidding aside, Microsoft already has a system like this in place and it occurs naturally called "Upgrades".
After three years Microsoft software becomes useless, usually through Microsoft's doing. Just look at the new upgrade to Windows XP. If you want the upgrade to Media Player 8 you have to purchase WinXP. The same happened with the Win95-98 switch and IE4+. You could get a copy for 95 but it was suspiciously broken in some areas (why, when I was still a Windows junkie, I upgraded). I also think that it would not have been very hard for Microsoft to upgrade 95 to use USB properly, but if you want USB you need to buy 98.
About the only people who still use three year old Microsoft software are those using Office, Windows NT (version 4) and possibly some of the developer tools.
Microsoft developer tools really don't change to offten. Bug fixes realized in new versions of Visual Studio are often times available via service packs for the older versions.
Office users still using old versions usually do so because they are either pirating the software (Microsoft won't see a dime from these people under the new licensing) and those who feel they don't use the software enough to justify the additional cost (they are definitely not going to justify the cost of buying the same version of a software title again). The later group of people compose the group that dare to use Office like solutions that are not Microsoft. Even with its flaws, Corel's Office software is not too shabby, and then there are the StarOffice and 602 Office titles (both free, later makes you pay for special features).
Windows NT4 is about the oldest Microsoft title still being used on a wide scale. This is because it is still being used as a server to keep many business running smoothly. It's difficult to upgrade servers that you rely on, I'm wanting to upgrade my Linux server at home but have put it off since my housemates rely on several services I have running on it. Imagine the effort needed to upgrade all the NT boxes for a multinational corporation. Even though these people have millions or billions of dollars, being told that they must either buy the new Microsoft server software or pay again for each existing server will make any multinational start looking for alternatives. Microsoft will have negated the only real point to the Microsoft NT vs. *nix debate, *nix may cost more over time. Currently NT is easy to administer (look at all the yahoos with MSCE) so you don't need highly skilled, yet expensive, system admins. All you need is a three month traing period (if that), a mouse and patience while the machine reboots. With *nix you will need highly skilled sys-admins, so its possible that salaries could push the *nix systems to be more expensive. In real life though, both types of admins cost about the same making both system just as expensive to operate. Now Microsoft wants to add an additional charge every three years that you won't find on *nix systems (cost of small upgrades don't count, Microsoft and *nix solutions both have similar upgrade costs), making Microsoft server software more expensive to use over time. Expect to see some "crossing over" if Microsoft does go through with this new licensing scheme.
Untill it's legal for Microsoft to make it so users must be connected to the internet so the software can validate itself with a Microsoft server (hopefully this never happens), any new licensing plan is going to fail just as badly at keeping pirated copies from being used/distributed as the current plan. Worst of all it's a punishment for the good little, "I buy and register all of my Microsoft software", drones, all because of those out there who rebel against the status quo. I'm fairly certain that it's poor business practice to piss off your loyal customer base. No matter how dependant they are on Microsoft software, sooner or later reasonable alternative will crop up. Even if later never happens, there will be a time when a huge paradigm shift will leave the slow monster of Microsoft struggling to keep up with the small start-ups. At that point Microsoft will need their loyal customer base to stay competitive.
The good sign is that Microsoft have been systematically finding problems with the new licensing scheme and have started to backtrack. The new three year subscription plan is a compromise of its monthly subscription plan. Expect to see any subscription plan to be abandoned by Microsoft soon after it starts or before it even begins. Remeber Office 2000?
Companies do not pay that money up front (except in rare instances). They get a lease or lease-purchase on the software. The monthly payment for the three years is probably about the same, but at the end of the lease purchase, you pay 10% or $1 or whatever, and with M$, you pay whatever their new scheme is.
(Forget MCSE's. How about a Microsoft Certified License Expert?)
-George
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Unfortunately, this is very short sighted. I agree with you on the quality of W2k.
But, in about 3 years, Microsoft will stop supporting W2k. Any bug or hole that is found thereafter won't be patched. Thus, by then, you'll have two choices: live with a vulnerable OS, or switch to another OS, a newer version of windows most likely.
Of course, all of these (expensive) migrations are an opportunity for open source products to move in. After all, if a (large) company decides not to support a product anymore, you can always do it yourself (being a large company). Might be cheaper than migrating to yet another version of software (be it an OS or an application)
----------------------------------------------
the pun is mightier than the sword
Here, in Memphis, TN, you are also taxed for equipment, software, etc. We have a declarations form where you have to declare total value of items used for business (including software and the like.. They even want a damn pencil and paper count, go figure). Fortunately for me while I was running my import Super Famicom business, my gear was mostly used for personal and school purposes and I was not required to claim it. YMMV in the area you live.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Just wait. It will get worse.
"It's Microsoft. It's got to be good." seems to be the idea Microsoft is trying to sell.
Steve Ballmer: "Windows XP will be the highest-quality Microsoft operating system ever, and Microsoft and our associates are committed to delivering a set of amazing new computing experiences that will set a new paradigm for PC users around the world."
I dunno about you, but "amazing new computing experiences" has me more than a little worried. Purple screen of death? With pink polka dots?
It is not completely true. There is something that is false, misleading, or could be said more accurately.
That is completely Not True - There is nothing that is correct and accurate.
It's not just a choice of word order. The meanings are quite different.
American businesses aren't taxed on assets, they are taxed on income. As far as I know, American businesses are in multiple jurisdictions and are subject to the rules and taxes of those jurisdictions. All of them.
Assets are generally valued at cost. Market price is irrelevant to the valuation.
Inventory and captial assets are taxed in the sense that they are bought with after-tax dollars, which are considerably dearer than expensable dollars. Inventory bought is not an expense. Inventory sold is expensed at the time of the sale.
The BSOD actually operates. I think it come bundled, no way to get it separately.
It's worse. When the vendor decides there's not enough money in it, your data goes bye-bye.
Precisely!
-brain
What do you mean it won't work? This is just a formal proposal to do what they allready do. Every few years release a new version of Windows or Office, and encourage everyone to upgrade.
It won't. We the computer power users are the people that upgrade their systems when new versions come out. Common... how many times have you gone to someone's (as in "non-computer" person) house and seen tha they're running the original release of Windows 95???
People that I work for and support don't care about the newest wizbang features. They simply want to do the 2 or 3 things their computer does for them and that's it. Upgrading to a new version usually means something is going to break for them, and that's how they see it.
This is the reason it won't work.
-brain
I just don't see how this is possibly going to work at this point.
Places like my company have spent WAY too much money to buy site licenses to not have to worry about doing "subscriptions". Besides, I don't think the public is ready for rentable software.
For the most part, if you ask any run of the mill Joe if he owns the software he bought, he's going to say "yes". The general computing public believes that they own the software they buy, just like other tangible items at the store. THey're not going to go for a fee that has to keep getting renewed. If Microsoft thinks that people are going to want to keep paying for the same software title over and over again, they're nuts.
-brain
Software rental is a bad idea for the same reason ASPs are a bad idea: you're giving up control of something fundamental to someone who has interests other than yours.
Self-terminating software licenses (a category I'd argue is differetn than "software rental") are indeed a bad thing, but I don't think that ASP's necessarily are: ASPs have some different interests, but they also have a compelling interest in looking out for their clients' interests as well, if they plan to retain clients and be viable over the long haul.
I've chosen to use ASP's for several critical business systems. ASPs are an extremely powerful tool for levelling the playing field for small companies which otherwise couldn't afford the purchase, much less the care and feeding of best-of-breed enterprise support systems. Careful selection of ASPs will include makin sure that you can always suck all your data out in some sort of reusable format whenever you want to. (Not all ASPs allow this, the better ones do, so caveat emptor...)
Whether ASPs will take off for more ordinary uses is up for debate now, but for basic use, there are a few solutions out there that aren't too bad - I use thinkfree office as a virtual alternative where I don't have to worry about the config of any borrowed computer so long as it has an Internet connection and a Java-capable browser. (In fact, I think thinkfree is the best implementation I've seen of a Java-based office suite...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Of course, if file formats werent arbitrarily changed all the time, supporting those older formats wouldnt _be_ a problem (or, heck, use PostScript. That worked in 89, and Im sure it works now). And if those helpdesk people werent forced to learn a new Office suite every year they woulnt have a problem with supporting the older versions.
A company that decides it wants off the upgrade treadmill can cut costs and be more competetive. There has been no significant increased value for most companies in upgrading something like Office for the last 5 years, and without any increased value there is no solid buisness reason for upgrading.
Whatever happened to the old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." ? Why should a company who has a perfectly working system be -forced- to spend more money on not only the software, but on training, upgrading time, etc.?
Just to bring out an example, that story on Slashdot a while back where the university's serve was left inside a wall for 4 or so years... It obviously worked flawlessly for that time (since they never even bothered to look for it), so why should they have to buy something new?
It's one thing to be forced to update your software to fix the company's mistakes, but it's a completely different thing to be forced to pay for an entirely new piece of software that may or may not add/remove things you want... (Imagine if people were forced to move from NT4 to 2000? That'd woulda caused havoc...)
I currently work for a small software company that does do the subscription model of sales for the manufacturing community. We in fact do more development now then when we did the "usual release" scheme. When you do the usual release scheme you bunch up all of your updates and patches into one big glob and then call it a new version. With the subscription, you are constantly adding new features and fixes. Subscriptions make v1.2 or v2.0 or whatever irrelavent, because the customer is just subscribed to the product.
There is a lot of support for this type of licensing in the industry, primarily because there isn't a big chunck spent at a time. The product that my company produces if bought in one fell swoop costs in the several tens of thousands of dollars or so at least, now with seat-based subscriptions companies are much more open to purchasing it and then ramping the number of subscriptions as it gets integrated. I don't know if this is an industry wide phenomenon, but it is my experience and $.02.
At least there still isn't a dongle that you have to put in/on your machine like many other software packages (like CAD).
but its not new in the unix world. alot highend software in unix is like this: mentor graphics, ansys, aspen, matlab the first few that come to mind. is this another concept that they are going to embrace and extend? who knows. if you think this makes them evil, think again. there are alot of better reasons, this makes them normal in the world of enterprise software.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
i don't know why this comes as a surprise etc.
to get the cheap per-seat pricing for education, you have pay a 2 year tithe, at the end of which you have to renew. at about $43 per seat, including licenses to access any back office application as well as for office pro, it's relatively affordable.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
Sure, it'll never work for the home user, but that's not what they're aiming at.
But therein lies the rub. If large companies are forced to use only the latest and greatest but smaller companies and home users can get away with using older versions, then how are the large software and hardware companies supposed to support their customers? If 40% of my customer base is using WinX but I'm only allowed to use WinX+1 then I'm pretty screwed.
Then again, I'm sure I have nothing to worry about since M$ will always licence every legacy version I could ever want in MSDN and won't ever audit me for "misusing" MSDN.
- bridgette
Something of this form would do:
That should get the right mix of reaction without setting off the loony alerts.
If your company doesn't have a better address to send this to, try:
RedHat [sells] subscription based 'support services' which [comes] with, by the way, free software upgrades during the time of the subscription. I mean, is there a whole lot of differences? I don't think the question is will the business community take to this new idea, it's how have they accepted it so far?
Well, let's see. MS wants to charge you a fee to get a 3-year license on the software, after which time you are not allowed to use it (it will probably stop working).
Red Hat charges nothing for download of their OS, nothing for access to the updates and their OS keeps working as long as you don't use hardware that's newer than the OS, and even then many things will work.
What you are refering to is Red Hat's RHN service which offers a convinient way to update your software through a GUI, an/or automatically update the software. They charge for this service, but they do not restrict access to the software or the raw updates at all. They also are still distributing updates for Red Hat 5.x which is 3 years old at this point.
If MS stops supporting Win98, you're up the creek. No source, no updates, no nothin'.
Companies would like to get the latest software, but don't like shelling out huge amounts of money in unpredictable little bursts. If MS spreads the cost of Office (what, about $500 for a typical setup?) over three years, thats about $15/month per workstation.
Except that the cost of the licence can be the least important thing. It costs money to change the software, to fix all the things that it broke, etc.
But if you have to change you may as well well change to free software anyway.
Or 60% dont have time to upgrade. Managing your installed software base often is the biggest costs.
More likely the costs of upgrading don't justify the expense. Which is considerably more than just the licences (for a payware product.)
How many of the new features of Office 2000 actually benefit the average corporate user?
Competition? It may not exist now, but if they just sit on their asses, you can be sure that it will exist. Right now, they just more or less compete with theirself (their old versions of their own software). It's harder for them to sell a new version by saying that it's more stable than the old one - that's why they create more features, which is why Word has a toolbar the size of Texas.
With subscription, they suddenly don't have to compete against their own old versions but only the competition. In my view, this means that feature work is no longer as high a priority as it was before. I could be wrong.
I don't agree. I think that companies of all sizes actually will LIKE subscription since it means they don't have to pay a huge sum up front but that the cost gets distributed over a longer time period. Remember that if Office costs $X now, it doesn't mean it will cost $X every year if the subscription plans happen but rather $X/5 or whatever, per year. Also, when there's a new version, upgrading is a non-issue cost-wise.
A side effect could be that Microsoft actually starts putting more weight on improving quality rather than adding new features, since there's no need to "lure" old customers to buy the new version - they will still pay for the subscription regardless of what version they are using.
For home users that would rather just pay once and then be done with it, I think subscription will be a bad thing. Someone might have money today and buy MS Office, but in three years, if they are unemployed, they won't be able to continue the subscription. That's a very bad thing.
I think a one-time "unlimited" license should definitely still be an option, but as far as companies not liking subscriptions, I think you're wrong.
What you guys don't realize is that third pary vendors have been doing this for quite some time. You pay them the one time fee for the software and then a small "Maintenance" fee each month to receive the next upgrade for free.
I know that large buisnesses have been doing this for a long time.
Josh
Plenty of projects, not enough developers...
MS has just informed the world that they own all the IntelliMice.
They will now charge for the distance that your mouse travels per month: $0.01 per foot or $100 whichever is more.
The new drivers with the billing information and credit card entries are required downloads. (You did install the Critical Update program didn't you?)
Thank you for help in making Bill the richest man in the world, again.
One thing that seems to have been forgotten is that MS is under no obligation to make the non-subscription software continuously available. All they have to do is stop allowing companies to buy more W2K licenses. This means that any new or replacement machines *must* be purchased with the new version of the OS (and of course, the same with Office). (Remember licenses are no longer transferable between machines.) It does mean MS has to wait, but in about 7-8 years after the switch, no company will have a legal W2K/O2K license.
Besides, I suspect that people *greatly* overestimate the willingness of large companies to switch. I'm convinced that MS could triple the amount it gets from larger companies before those companies would think of switching to other systems.
Yeah, until the NEXT time Microsoft changes the licensing scheme to suck more money out of its far-flung empire. Your assumption: "pay this non-stop forever and they dont have to ever worry..." in the context of Microsoft is a huge reach, IMO.
--
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Your analogy doesn't work....
Please tell my dad he need to buy a new car because his '56 Porsche 356 coupe breaks down once in a while. Or maybe he needs to drop the 70 Chevelle 454ss and buy a Kia because the Chevelle needs it's valves adjusted every 3-4000 miles.
The analogy you need to equate this to Microsoft is: You lease a car for 3 years. at the end of three years they tell you you can re-lease it for another 3 years, or for $XXX.XX more, you can get the newer model, but you are can't buy it outright. If you decide not to re-lease the car, you are free to walk away (literally).
my toaster is a disposable item. it has very few (if any) serviceable part. they design it this way. if I had to re-load the toasting controls on my toaster as I have to reload my OS, then there would be some backlash.
maX_
Microsoft's old market strategy was to (arguably) improve their products so every three years or so you would have to upgrade to get the latest features, etc. Now they don't feel like reving old software anymore so they are just going to force you to buy a new copy of their software every three years or so.
So... if you have that really nice Linux box set up, why wouldn't you just use it then ? :-)
This is my sig. Hooray !
> Who uses software that's three years old anyway? I mean - at my company, Office 97 is almost impossible to find anymore. Users want the latest and greatest.
Lemme get this straight - the secretary knocks on your door and says "I want Office 2000! Because Clippy is just soooo much cuter in 2000!"
Where I work, the secretary says "Oh shit, you mean I have to learn Office all over again?", often followed by with "...and it'll make my computer run slower, won't it?"
Wanna find out if your users really "want the latest and greatest?" Grab a nontechnical user who remembers working with Windows 3.1 in an office environment.
Install Windows 3.1 and Office 4.2 on a modern PC (i.e., P166 or greater). Reboot. Sit the user in front of the PC. Type "win" from the DOS prompt. Windows will be up and running in less than 3 seconds.
If the first word out of their mouth is anything other than "Wow!", I think I've made my point.
(OK, my example breaks down because they also want a web browser, most likely IE4 or higher, and network connectivity. So they'll probably want their Win9x or NT box back after a few minutes. But I'll still bet the first word out of their mouth is "wow".)
Moderators, How is this insightful?
Now, as to Microsoft requiring business customers to pay again after 3 years seems kind of crappy. Decisions about what software to use should be in the customer's hands, not in the seller's. My guess is that this is a customer support based decision - i.e. they don't want to support legacy software products after 3-5 years. They've also probably based the 3 year rule on the fact that most businesses upgrade their software after 3 years anyway. It's just bull that they're not going to let the businesses decide for themselves when the best time for upgrading is. Can you imagine the uproar that's going to happen if everyone's 3-year contract happens to run out smack in the middle of a recession???
Microsoft just seems to be digging itself deeper into a hole, causing people to look at alternate solutions. Either Gates has lost his business savvy or someone else is running the ship, cause this is just stupid.
--
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
The discussion over this one has been great IMO because it brings some points to light vis a vis enterprises that have even more impact on the home market. The most compelling of these is that a reasonable new home system decked out with MS software is going to cost about $2000. The nature of these upgrades is that the entire home system becomes obsolete every 3 years. Now I know Americans are well off, but how many $2000 purchases do you make where the lifespan of the purchased product is 3 years? I've owned a TRS-80 Model 1, A Mac, A Mac SE, a Gateway P60, a Dell XP, and a Micron Laptop. This year, when the MS upgrade spin started I looked at buying yet another computer... and that was it. I cut my Dell over to Red Hat Linux with Star Office and I ain't goin back...
I want to be alone with the sandwich
scent = stinks
cents = expensive
sense = Migration
Microsoft's moves are somewhat enigmatic these days, however they have a keen sense of how to make money off of fortune 500 companies who are willing to dish it out after "TRAPPING" themselves amidst an entire MS environment.
Whats sad though, is at this point it would be extremely expensive for companies to switch their entire company (think big companies like Ernst & Young, Citibank, etc.) to switch over to something else overnight. Even if they were to do so, they would also have to determine what other OS to use, and hope it would still have MS support, since many of their clients are likely to prefer *.doc, *.lxs, etc., files, so even if a company were planning a switch it could take years to "plow the road" from the bumps.
With newer companies starting up its a heck of a lot easier a task to do, and I'm sure many here see the recent changes with MS, so news like this is a plus for the Open Source community, who needs to lock down some standards for a change as well.
Define a standard for corporations like a corporate Linux or BSD distribution which doesn't contain 2-3 cd's full of Window Managers, MP3 players, useless and non business related packages. What does 10 Windows Manager have to do with fulfilling the daily tasks of someone like a secretary, or clerical worker? Absolutely none.
Make it a bit more GUI'er for unknowledgeable persons working with the OS.
Raise the documentation standards on the OS. Make a GUI based help system unskilled operators could use instead of `man something` .
Anyways enough swaying off topic many people (I hope) would understand the aura of where that was going. So will this affect sales of MS in the future? Probably minutely since many people like convenience, and are already trapped within an MS environment, and all this bickering amongst the BSD's/Linux users doesn't help, so for someone like a CEO looking in from the outside, they may see alternative OS' (Linux/BSD/other) as more of a problem than a solution.
Create a business like standard for crying out loud. If NASA can send rockets to west bubble fuck, surely someone can create a "Linux/BSD for Incompetent Workers too Lazy or Dumb to Learn"
Want Root?
Actually, I've got a very big tool. I'm a huge Tool fan too. dumbass troll...
I'm going to delete WinX from my entire network, not just a simple workstation. If you think I'm making this decision bsaed solely on this one M$ bashing story, well I'd like to talk to you about this bridge I have...
And who's the dumbass moderator that modded me down as redundant? Look at the posting order. I'm post #13. You're possibly seeing someone else asking the same sort of question much later than me, but to an earlier post. Jeez, ask a simple question.
Dive Gear
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
You buy a car... it starts breaking down... you have to buy a new car. Or, you can pay them continually for replacement parts.
Hell, the same thing goes for toasters.
Microsoft is just trying to replicate the standard model of *physical* products in the realm of *intellectual* products.
Wonder if they'll have the software license run out based on variable conditions, like car warrantees. With cars, it's always something like 3 years or 30,000 miles... maybe with Windows it'll be 3 years or 3000 blue screens, whichever comes first.
I know, I know, you're thinking "of course the 3000 blue screens will come first!". But remember, many users often can't turn their computer on, let alone open Word. Those who can, of course, will get their blue screen on schedule. But those users need to pay more often.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
There could be one good thing about the new office (XP): They're getting rid of clippy! http://www.microsoft.com/office/clippy/
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
Indeed this is good: I hope that companies using MSFT products have to bleed and pay as much as possible. They must be punished for their "sin", and companies using less MSFT products will be more competitive.
Riiiiight. I don't think they'll dare cut off support for their business customers, it's one of their strong points, and they know it. NT is up to... SP6?
Well, SP6 was released in Oct of 1999 (as reported by the Downloads page of MS' site). I'm sure there have been problems since then...
And their strong point hasn't been support for their business customers unless they aren't making fixes for them publicly available. In general, SP's have historically broken things because they don't thoroughly test them. MS even tells you to not install it unless you absolutely have to.
"The area of penetration will no doubt be sensitive." ~ Spock
I understand why you don't like E,but personally, I think it's great. It's a PITA to configure some things because you have to edit config files, but most of it can actually be done with the menus now. I REALLY like the iconbox, I minimize windows constantly, and I find it much easier/quicker to glance and the iconbox and click on the window I want to bring up.
As for sawfish, nothing you said about it was correct. All the behavior of the windows can easily be changed, you can easily set every action just how you want it.
Please go buy a clue from someone who has one before you go ranting about these things. It really only takes 5 minutes to figure out how to configure sawfish and do it, if you can't even do that...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
It appears not many posters have actually read the CNet story properly.
... give them 2 years to put some real polish on it and we'll see if you really need XP")
This licensing model might affect Enterprise agreements only. We are on "Select" with 3,500 and even that is not included in the 3 year thing. However, I suppose time will tell.
Time to demo the Mandrake 8.0 box I've just put together ("Well, KOffice hasn't been around for long
I haven't used windows on my own system in years.
Just wish I didn't have to help friends with their windoze problems.
--
http://www.spinics.net/linux
Look at the requirements for Windows 2000. They are a lot higher than Windows 98. Most people have computers that are more than 3 years old. MS better be making the new version compatible with hardware older than 1 year if they expect people to stay.
Newer software and technologies come out, but these are not things that require you to upgrade. There are lots of people out there still using WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. If your needs don't change, why should your software?
--
Lord Nimon
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Why bother.....The OEMs and only the biggest companies (Ford, Boeing) are what BillCo listen to.
They know the smaller shops pirate the code, so they are not paying customers.
If you pay for licenses, for all but a few of "us" it is not "our" money, it is the companies money. Let the bosses know there may be a budget increase in the next years. The company you work for will just have to figure out some other way to pay the bill. Suggest a cut in executive pay.
Better to watch your own world, put in BSD-GNU/Linux where it can fit, and move out the M$ Licenses where you can. That is the best way to watch out for the interests of your firm bottom line. Writting a letter to M$ won't get your firm squat.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Boot your PHB's computer into BIOS, set the clock ahead three years, shut down... "This OS will self-destruct in 10 seconds"
Microsoft is losing money. Well, not really. Really Gates has so much money he wipes his butt with $100s. However, the company profit margins are not what they were 3-4 years ago. The primary reason is that people are not buying new computers. Windows ME and 2000 are not meeting sales expectations.
In general, people are reasonably happy with Windows 98, Word, and IE. And a reasonably happy consumer is not going to give you more money.
So enter reason one for subscriptipn service. A revenue stream. The Microsoft OS has matured, and regular upgrades are unnecessary. So Microsoft will force them on you, but making subscription services much less expensive than stand-alone software.
Reason number two is that they will get to have an install disk or program on your computer every few years. This install program will comb your computer, find your default settings, and change all computers to using IE as the browser, and Windows Media Player as the Media Player, and make life very difficult if you want to use anything but MSN for an ISP. The more often Microsoft can override default settings, the more network traffic they will control.
No need to say that while a magazine give you new info and say "playboy" give you new eh.. "enjoyment" a new copy of windows does what the old copy of windows does with maybe a few more improvements.
Say the switch from 3.1 to 9X. Now that was an improvment. You have way better graphics and a better interface. But I know of companies still running 3.1. Why? Cause it works!
The switch from 9X to 2000 was also reasonabled. It is more stabled ( a questionable statment in my own experiences ).
But look at the switch from NT to 2000. Sure you get plug and play. But that's not seriously an improvment. Most servers have what a bottom of the pile video card and some NICs you don't need plug and play.
What MS can do with this new pay scheme is not to offer you any reason to upgrade but make you do it. They can say whoops we don't offer lience for word 97 anymore sorry you'll have to pay for an upgrade to 2000.
Imagin getting the same copy of some magazine. For example sake take playboy again. Same photos same articals in a different lay out! all new ! woohoo!!!
I agree. M$ realized several years ago that Win2K is about as far as they can go before needing a huge change in order keep those customers who upgrade. They realized that right about this time, they're going to need another change the like of what Windows 95 was, in order to maintain their dominance over the market. That change is .NET and I think that this change to subscription based licenses for Office XP is just the beginning. This change will ease the 'everyday user' in to the mindset of subscription software, so that when .NET finally arrives, it won't be as much of a shock. Look for more and more M$ products to go subscription based as well.
--- Rectum?! Damn near killed em'! - Confucius
Subscription based software isn't all that new at all, I don't see why nobody got upset until M$ tried it. Companies like Oracle, HP, IBM, and others all have subscription-type liscensing schemes for some of their biggest products. The Linux community should be last to complain, because many Linux software companies employ a subscription-type marketing scheme to make their money. In fact, a lot of Open Source companies are depending on schemes like the one M$ is doing in order to keep their doors open. Take for instance E-Smith Linux, or RedHat, both sell subscription based 'support services' which both come with, by the way, free software upgrades during the time of the subscription. I mean, is there a whole lot of differences? I don't think the question is will the business community take to this new idea, it's how have they accepted it so far?
--- Rectum?! Damn near killed em'! - Confucius
I know no one is going to read this because htere are already 200 posts, but this is just stupid and slimy.
/doesn't/ work for them, and that they need to buy (BUY! NOT RENT!) new software.
How many companies out there still use DOS based computers, or still have a pentium 90 with 16mb of RAM? How many still use old copies of netware? Tons and Tons and Tons. Why? Because why should they pay for new software when the old software (and hardware - requiring a new OS every 3 years, essentially means that users will have to buy new hardware too) still serves their purposes perfectly. Now M$ will tell them that it
-Cire
I don't think other software firms will follow suit. I work for a software company, and while we don't have time-limited licenses, we stick it to you with maintenance fees.
When you buy the software, you get whatever licenses you bought for forever(actually until 2035, but it's a numbers thing), you also have a maintenance contract that entitles you to support, upgrades, and patches.
If you don't want upgrades, or want to try and work without support, you can let your maintenance expire, and you're done.
It's a good sceme for us to ensure revenue, and mitigate the cost of our support staff, plus the customer can stop paying and still use the product.
Everyone loves license managers! As the most critical piece of unwanted software on your network, it's important that license managers be stable and reliable. Fortunately, they always are, so desperate IT managers have never had to waste hours on the phone with tech support fixing license manager configuration errors that have brought the entire company to its knees.
Microsoft has enough trouble now, with its perpetual licenses, helping enterprise customers help themselves ensure that all Microsoft software is appropriately licensed. An innovative new software delivery technology requires innovative new software, so it's clear that integrated LicenseManagerWizard (trademark pending) technology is going to be an important part of Windows 2002 (available Q1 2004).
It's difficult to overstate the benefits. Microsoft's stamp of approval on your license manager software is Bill Gates' personal software-quality guarantee to you that your LM won't let you down. Microsoft's tech support will be happy to assist you (for a nominal fee) with your LM configuration, in the unlikely event that the comprehensive online help ("How do I use the mouse?", "Why is my printer icon greyed out?") doesn't answer your question.
What's more, Microsoft's OpenLicense API will permit (and encourage!) even the smallest Windows software developers to deliver their software on a subscription basis with only minimal testing of their licensing infrastructure, leveraging this important new technology to help simplify and streamline your organization's license management policies and procedures.
LM technology is also an important part of Microsoft's .NET initiative, in the sense that organizations will be encouraged to adopt .NET technology by the absence of any legal means to continue licensing discontinued non-.NET software.
It's good news for everyone.
This is not a big deal for enterprise customers, because on accounting sheets, the standard practice is to use a 3 year depreciation period for software i.e. every year, you count 1/3 of the cost of software towards the cost of operations for that year - after 3 years, the software is considered "obsolete". Therefore MS's 3 year subscription model makes little difference to most enterprise customers as it merely makes a standard practice a legal requirement.
This is actually good for free software. I don't think any business in their right minds would subscribe to software.
Think about it. You're running a business and you want to make sure that it continues to run smoothly. Why would you make a business decision that could possibly result in not using the software that drives your business?
I'm glad MS is doing this. It will increase the effect of the free software revolution.
"Sure, it'll never work for the home user, but that's not what they're aiming at."
--
Free Mac Mini
Now Microsoft forces you to upgrade every 1-2 years and you have to pay a fee... In the future you will only have to pay every 3 years... So what's the difference???
Actually, now that I think about it, this gives them an additional incentive to be late with new products. Not only would people be forced to renew their older license, but then they'd upgrade as well. Microsoft would have no incentive to release products faster than the subscription cycle time...
I just thought of something. If you are pirating their software, you haven't actually agreed to be audited on those machines that are pirating the software. I guess you shouldn't mix your shop, and should steal all the software so that you never enter into any auditing grey area.
t
The software industry needs to be pushed by either customers or congress to accept one or the other. If software companies go to a subscription basis for their software then patents could make it so that certain "technology" is not available in any software currently on the market. If software companies want to patent/copyright their work then they should not be able to place time limits on the usage of the software.
I'm not arguing for or against software patents or copyrights or subscription sales. I'm simply arguing that if software companies want to "force" customers into upgrades through "expired" licenses they should not be able to lock-up the technology and the software for decades.
If Micro$oft doesn't think it can make money on Windows 3.1 anymore what have they got to loose with it going into the public domain? People will still upgrade their systems to the latest OS for the exact same reason that they upgrade their OS now. Those reasons (application availability, cool factor, technical support, etc.) will continue to exist even if the old version written over 10 years ago is in the public domain.
Operating systems wear out too. Computers get faster, Newer software comes out, New technology comes out. These are all things that could require you to get an new OS. We can't really predict what will happen in the future so the OS can't really be designed to handle what we can't predict. We can try to cover what minght happen, but we are sometimes wrong.\ =\=\=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=
The choice would be yours with the OS too. If you want to put the money into it then you can keep using the OS, if you don't, then you can't. I'm not saying it's right, but I like playing devil's advocate.= \=\=\=\=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\
The OS is coming to a maturity and MS is going through a middle-aged crisis. With Win2K, there really isn't a *need* to upgrade anymore. Its stable and simple refinement is all that it needs. So now we are bound to see useless things like 3D GUIs and 3 year licenses.
I think Win2k was the best and worst thing that ever happened to MS. Its a great OS and the end of their revenue stream. What happens when the market saturates with it? There only chance is to push XP as a subscription into the consumer markets where Win2K doesn't have a foothold yet.
More
Seems like registering for UNIX Systems Administration last semester was a smart move on my part. If Rich Uncle Billy Gates wants to play around with license agreements, then all this consumer has to say is "NO WAY! I'm switching to Linux, whether you like it or not!" Besides the money I save on a licensing fee is better off going into my gas tank.
PING is not broken.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
-pf
Make affiliate bucks
Fact is, Microsoft is so greedy that it's entirely noncommital to all ideas: both the good and bad. It's such a profit-driven business that negative press has a discernable effect. Microsoft has backed off on a lot of things recently: the web-integrated desktop (_web_ and _desktop_, not _browser_ and _OS_, which MS did push for), excessive use of analogues for UI (MS Bob), cute little animated agents that pop up when you're trying to work (good riddance, Clippy), the list goes on and on and on. Simply put: Microsoft is not a trend-setter and it never has been. It follows trends and through whatever cunning tactics necessary (even those bad for the industry or against the law), ends up in domination.
So don't overestimate Microsoft's ability to force users into anything. IMHO: Microsoft is an evil company. But the PR department still hasn't perfected mass hypnosis, so it keeps its ear tuned to the users. If Microsoft thinks users will reject this notion in favor of more traditional models, it won't make the move because then competitors can sneak into the cracks.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
Give us your money so you can be happy? It's like M$ is turning to televangelism to sell their products.
Seriously though. Not everyone is willing to spend the money every three years on new software. In fact I'm willing to bet that nowadays the average computer owner doesn't upgrade his OS at all until he buys a new machine. My parents have been happily using Winblows 95 since it came out and I personally have only been using 98 for a couple of months. It wasn't until games stopped working that I switched. (That's all windows is to me.. a tool for playing games. It's nearly useless for serious work)
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
the Adinistration wants to switch from Mac's to Windows, but the Sys Admin's want to stay with Apple.
Why not have both apple and wintel hardware? (1) In the real world, not every OS may do what you want. My experience is in a mixed hardware environment (windows, apple, unix), all of whose OSes have been needed to help solve research problems. (2) Would the administration be interested in running linux on the apples? That software is free. And the idea behind open source software is fundamentally what Academia is about. However, it is true linux isn't quite up to mainstream support. (3) Having and using both types of hardware, instead of discarding just all the apple machines and "doing what everyone else is doing", can serve as a reminder of "freedom of thought", which in part means to me avoiding getting stuck on relying one company to provide all your hardware and software solutions.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
You cannot even see www.microsoft.com from the browser installed with their own software!!!
NT 4.0 installs IE 2.0, and they've written their site so that you must have at least 3.0 to get any content.
So they sell you software, they make it obsolete, and they don't even give you a path to upgrade.
Nothing new here...
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WWhhaatt ddooeess dduupplleexx mmeeaann??
This sig intentionally left justified.
Man, you should be marketing genious. Looks like it could be not bad business to build and to lease out these machines to companies for 3 years just to scary M$ salesmen.
Oh, "and even more" -- you can declare them automaticaly obsolete after this term...
The other funny thing is that they want to switch to MS now that Apple has a fully robust Unix architecture going for it. Seems like they are saying "Uh oh! Looks like the Apples aren't going to be crashing every other minute now, better move to Windows so as to preserve our pitifully low uptimes."
Schools are weird places.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Using 3 year subscribtions on their software makes it harder for most people to switch to linux.
Once they have a contract for 3 years for any ms product, switching their os will feel bad, because they still have to pay every month for their ms office and or win xp, and they cannot use it! I bet the new office will depend on many "hidden features" in xp for example and thus will be very hard maybe even impossible to run under Wine.
The more people use office the more its formats become the standard in the socalled e-conomy and the more other people depend on it too.
So people sit out the ride and when it ends they subscribe again and there's nothing they can do about it.
This is what the sad future starts to look like to me (not for me!).
To paraphrase slightly:
The more you tighten your grip, Bill, the more systems will slip through your fingers"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
This might backfire on MS. But then again, this is nothing that a little 'education' cannot overcome
And if 'education' fails, there is always 'legislation'.
Then there's always monopoly power. ("We're the only $monopoly in town", where $monopoly is one of ["bakery", "DSL provider", "undertaker"], etc.)
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
I think the spin to put on this is: with software rental, you don't control your data any more--Microsoft does. Once upon a time, you bought an application, created your documents or databases, and could use them happily ever after. Now, to get to your very own data, you have to keep paying. And paying. And paying.
Where did the assumption that this was a monthly subscription service including automatic upgrades come from?
AFAI could see, you pat the license fee now, in one lump sum, and if you still want to use the software in 3 years you pay it again.
If you upgrade before you're license ends, you pay a new license fee for the new software, (possibly a reduced fee because of the previous license).
How exactly does this differ from the present situation, other than that you pay MS, whether you choose to upgrade or not?
If these licenses can be sold to a third party, maybe the accounting department will be happy.
Otherwise it's a fixed expense, that can't be a huge burden if revenue decreases.
You can fire the workers, but you'll still be paying your Windows licenses. Great.
So imagine this scenario: three years from now your license to Win2k expires. And Microsoft don't want to give you a key to unlock it for a further three years; they want you to move to Win2k+3 so they can reduce their support burdens, lock you into a new set of ABIs or whatever. So you're forced to upgrade. And now you're faced with a hard deadline to upgrade everything, convert data from formats they or other software vendors have decided are passe and find replacements for apps that Microsoft has put out of business either intentionally or accidentally.
Software rental is a bad idea for the same reason ASPs are a bad idea: you're giving up control of something fundamental to someone who has interests other than yours.
I am as baffled as you are. I thought maybe it would be marked as funny, but insightful? Wierd.
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You're right, and Divx ;) is business model that consumers can really embrace!!
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both sides, Microsoft and the Fortune 500 purchasing agents. In both cases, those two players can't see the forest (the reasons for buying software) because of the trees (cost).
I am not an IT professional. I am a design engineer. I wonder why are we getting in the mode of buying software because it's cheaper, regardless of whether it performs better for those using it? As an employee of one of the top 100 in the Fortune 500 companies, I have not seen any major OS features and only a few Office Features that offer any reason to upgrade.
I must carefully select what software I want upgraded on my computer (right now I am given a choice), because my daily job does not allow me to spend too much time relearning what I can already do with what I've got. Upgrades had better *significantly* improve the ease of use for me, or else the time to retrain myself to do daily tasks ends up far more expensive than the time saved using minor feature updates.
Frankly, the security of the system does concern me, and an *upgrade* of the Win95 system I am using to at least approach the security of most UN*ces might offer some financial/competitive benefit for the company on par with what our engineering teams deliver, but how will that benefit compare to the lost timing in upgrading my operational skills? What, exactly, does Win2k or XP offer that will offset the slowdown of my machine (let's face it, hardware upgrades are not always realized as often as software upgrades)?
I admit, it would take some real effort on a company's part to answer those questions. More often than not, the questions are simply not asked. More often than that, new questions are asked later (by upper management, the same ones who signed off on the software *upgrades*) along the lines of "Why has our productivity gone down so much this year? I want answers, and I want them now." Thus the viscious cycle continues...
I'm not a right winger, or a left winger. I'm somewhere in betweener.
Saying "I'm sorry, could you resend that as Word 95 format please?" isn't an option with some clients.
But you can say "I'm sorry, could you send me the source code for that format's reader please?" or "I'm sorry, could you resend that as plain text, HTML, LaTeX, or gzipped PostScript format please?" if you have made it clear to your clients that your company embraces (not in the MS sense) standards and not proprietary formats whose maintainers have threatened to sue you (countersuits on grounds of legal harassment are not common in the States) should you reverse-engineer them.
Will I retire or break 10K?
at the enterprise level, hp opemmail can run on linux well... not exactly a home user package though. *shrug*
--- I never lie when I have sand in my shoes.
As long as Word 2006 still opens ASCII file, I think I'll be ok.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
In fact, I just read an article this morning that stated that Microsoft is holding off, for now, on releasing XP as a subscription-based piece of software, and may be testing the proverbial water in the overseas market first.
The reactions thus far have been almost all negative; the only way MS could convince people to pay for subscriptions is if the price was much lower than the current price of purchasing the software outright.
You may transfer ownership of the disk without in any way transfering license to USE the software, much as you may transfer ownership of a car without transfering your license to drive it.
"A copyright is the exclusive right granted to 'authors' under the U.S. Copyright Act to copy, adapt, distribute, publicly perform, and publicly display their works of authorship." So, actually, you have it completely backward. Copyright law applies to your distribution of the work, not to your use of the work. Of course, loading it onto your computer or into memory is considered copying.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Speak for yourself. Where I work we're using office 97, primarily because of the 97/95 doc file fiasco on NT 4.0 boxes. There is absolutely no reason for us to upgrade to win2000 or XP or office 2000. IT here probably agrees; the computers primary use in the building/facility I work at is primarily to use a windows based application to access the mainframe & perform various transactions. The use of MS Office applications is necessary but I don't think our IT department needs, wants or seeks "support" from MS.
btw let me clarify. We use office 97 on nt 4.0 boxes. I know the word 95/97 file format was for all versions, not limited to NT versions of word.
If businesses get the idea that such software is effectively free, then the only viable revenue streams become servicing the infrastructure and writing apps on top of it - something VARs and consultants are great for, but doom for MS. [But where IBM has a long track record - see any connection? ]
So they move to a subscription model where you HAVE to upgrade every three years, whether you need their new features or not, incurring the additional training costs, file-format incompatibilities, etc., but provide Big Bill with a steady cashflow. It dovetails nicely with the Mundie rant last week about Open Source being Evil, Stupid and Wrong. If they can delay interest in OSS until they get the market locked into their dot-Net subscription scheme, they OWN you forever.
This could be the best prod to Lotus/Corel/StarOffice in ages to clean up their compatibility filters and get back into the game.
Answer? Start pushing three-to-four-year leases, where you end up turning over the car and keeping the dealer in dollars... Now MS can't talk people into upgrading (Good Enough Syndrome), people aren't replacing their PCs as often so the OEM cashflow is thinning, so what do they do? Move to a lease-based structure to keep the dollars flowing through.
they won't have to worry about deploying/managing updates and upgrades
What? How won't they? As somone who has spent time developing and excecuting plans to deploy and upgrade software packages across the enteprise (I spent a year as a consultant for Production Management in a telecom firm, we managed the software on several thousand pc's and servers for y2k) I can tell you that a major upgrade every three years will be a severe setback and expense for many companies. Stop, you were going to say SMS weren't you? SMS is NOT qualified to upgrade several thousand PC's at once (I know this all to well).
The other thing you don't seem to understand is the way some companies will stick to standards. I was consulting for an engineering company some time ago. Take a guess what their word processing department was using. WordPerfect 5.1 for dos. I kid you not. Why? It has a certain font that had become a company standard, so they used it just to get that one font. Software hangs around longer than you think. Did you know that until 1998 Win3.1 was still the most deployed desktop in the world? My point is that for most people and especially most companies this WILL be a problem. As other's have said, companies would rather just get somehting installed and go with it. And for the people who like to talk about taxes, they fail to realize that companies would rather depriciate their software and hardware for loss dollars than anything else (including lease).
Politics, Culture, Food?
You can export anything from Outlook (especially the email and calendar) using its own tools. Click the "Import and Export" option on the "File" menu. It'll output to text, comma- or space-delimited tables, et al. From there, you can import them or whatever you need to do.
For the most part, if you ask any run of the mill Joe if he owns the software he bought, he's going to say "yes". The general computing public believes that they own the software they buy, just like other tangible items at the store. THey're not going to go for a fee that has to keep getting renewed. If Microsoft thinks that people are going to want to keep paying for the same software title over and over again, they're nuts.
Exactly. Does everyone remember Circuit City's Divx (not the codec, but the DVD competitor)? It failed miserably for this very reason. Many of the people who purchased Divx players were surprised to discover that they didn't actually own the discs that they had "bought." Circuit City claimed that they weren't able to secure adequate Hollywood support, but it was also quite clear that the consumers overwhelmingly rejected the business model.
This software scheme isn't any different. As anyone who has suffered through providing tech support knows, users will continue to use software forever, or at least long after its useful life cycle. I know people who are still using Office 95, and one guy who is still trying to install Office 4.3 (for Windows 3.1) on his Win2K Pro machine. MS is in for a world of hurt if they're serious about this scheme.
>never really understood why Word that came out in >the win95 timeframe was never good enough to >stick with. do you REALLY need office-2000?
i'd stick with the last rev of wordperfect for dos if i could, but due to ever changing propreitary file formats i wouldn't be able read anything written in a higer rev file format. it seems to me that the file format changes that accompany every new release of ms office has already accomplished planned obsolescence.
On one hand, I feel that this is just Microsoft getting thier little greedy hands back into the cookie jar. It is a way for them to charge for software that has already been paid for. Imagine spending $500 on Office 2000, and then 3 years later, having to spend $500 again, just to use the same software for another 3 years? I'm not sure if this is how it would work, but it's a scary possibility.
On the other hand, I totally agree with the cost of software being spread out over time. It would be much more beneficial to smaller companies that do not have the cash to shell out for a lot of software at once. However, this is just one step closer to the .NET architecture, which I don't think anyone is looking forward to.
I have a feeling I'm going to be using Office 2000 and Windows 2000 for a long long time to come, as Whistler and Office XP go too far in trying to implement this subscription based model, the .NET architecture, and other privacy invasions that Microsoft feels is standard business.
Of course, Linux will remain popular on all my desktop PC's.
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That depends on where the business is at. Last month a car dealership here in Montgomery county VA won a court case against the county. What was the dealership doing? Before the end of the fiscal year, the dealership would move their cars to another lot in the next county to avoid the inventory tax. :)
I'm really suprized that the car dealership won that case.
"Drug related crime" is a misnomer, "prohibition related crime" is the more accurate and correct phrase.
This might backfire on MS. But then again, this is nothing that a little 'education' cannot overcome.
if some vendor pulled crap like this on me, I'd just revert to using the last version before the license change and when that stopped being useful, I'd dump the vendor entirely.
how many people could NOT do their jobs if they had to use Word from the '95 era? sure, some of the file formats have changed, but if you ask the sender/author to save in '95 format, you're all set.
if the vendors push TOO hard, customers will either push back (stop supporting the vendor) or just go full renegate and stop paying license fees altogether. a little greed is ok; too much and you'll get the opposite of your intended effect.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Wrong, although close. You got the order of the words incorrect.
It is not completely true.
There that's better.
You yourself admit it is not completely true with your last sentence.
Now then, you are allowed to sell your non OEM Windows disk. You own that. You do not own the software contained on the disk. You license that. I don't like that fact any more than you do, but that is the law.
You may transfer ownership of the disk without in any way transfering license to USE the software, much as you may transfer ownership of a car without transfering your license to drive it.
In the case of OEM Windows, ( which is NOT preinstalled on every computer), the EULA specificly forbids transfer of the license, except as installed on the original machine.
Most larger businesses don't buy a disk for each install however. They buy a limited number of disks, perhaps only one, and purchase a site license based on the number of 'seats' or 'users.'
This license is not only non transferable and therefore not an asset, but has no actual physical object attached to it at all! It is pure intellectual property.
Have you not been following the stories of MS stepping up its license audits lately?
KFG
My sense of humor tends to be painfully dry.
I was perfectly aware of every possible interpretation of my statement, including the humorous.
I've always been particularly intrigued by how societies that *value* money above all else tend to blur the meanings of the words 'value' and 'price'.
It's fairly easy to mess with the heads of people in who's minds the disticntion is not clear.
KFG
I'm not.
They deserved to.
KFG
Perhaps I should have worded my post a bit more carefully.
When I said "American businesses" I did not mean to take into account every local tax code.
Still, I have now been warned about certainly localities not to do business in.
KFG
American businesses aren't taxed on assets, they are taxed on income. I'm not sure where you get the idea that it is otherwise. Perhaps you are confused by the popular misconception that there is an *inventory* tax? Inventory is not legally synonomous with asset. Inventory is an asset * specifically held for resale*. The expense on inventory is not deductable as an * expense* until the item is sold, thus making it APPEAR as if inventory were taxed. It isn't, of course. Purchasing inventory is deducted as an expense against income.
Purchasing software is an *expense* and is therefore deductable against income. However, it is a *capital* expense and must be depreciated over a period of years.
Leased items are an *operating* expense and may be deducted in their entirety in the year of the expendature.
What's more even if your view of taxation were correct software STILL wouldn't be an asset. The value of an asset is what it could be SOLD for.
What can you legally sell a used copy of MS Windows for? That's right boys and girls, you can't legally sell it at all, it has ZERO value!
Money spent on software is, to the value of the company, roughly the same as money spent on toilet paper. It is money flushed down the hole that *reduces* the overall value of the company. That's why purchasing is so loath to get you that copy of " Really spiffy shit 2001" that you want so badly.
Leasing software may increase profit in any given year by allowing the full deduction in that year.
Am I going to lease software for my company? Not on your fscking life. I can obtain all the software I need for free.
KFG
--Don't eben sell a copy of the damn product, make it only accessible from IE.
Want word? www.word.app
Want excel? www.excel.app
Want Norton Antivirus? www.nav.app
Want Lotus Notes? www.notes.app
Sell 1 year licenses. No effing upgrades, it's all on the server. Go a company, MS sells you an Office Server. Need 250,000 people on it great here's the box all you users can log into the appo with a shortcut.
I'm all for it.
Life WOULD be easier if everyone just used Office.
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This
I really can't believe what I am seeing. I have seen slippery slopes before, but M$'s seems to be glare ice.
Now I don't want to get off on a rant here, but it seems that Microsft's desire to make money has done nothing but hurt us as a computerized community. When they took control of the market so many years ago, I don't think anynone envisioned their power getting to this level. At first, you only needed liscences per computer, then they wanted you to have Office Liscences per user on that computer. Subscription is nothing new, but M$ is doing whatever they can to make it difficult for the average business.
What will this do? This will, of course, give M$ more money than they have already to throw around in special intrest groups and at software companies so they only have a desire to make and support Windows apart from any other Operating System. Not to mention the burden that will be put on IS manager all over who not only have to keep track of when all of their PC's go off lease in 3 years, but also now the software.
Kudos to M$, they continue to amaze me with their greed. It would just be nice if we could trust them to do the right things with their money.
In closing, I am all for capitalism. I love the idea of using money to make money. The problem is when companies use money to deliberately run others out of business.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
I think you miss the point: That office you describe looks at the software as part of the cost of the equipment. Since all of the major PC suppliers (Dell, Micron, Gateway, etc) offer PC's with Office pre-installed, and since the pricing schemes on these companies' web sites seem to imply that Office is free with the machine, and since MS has done such a good job maintaining backward compatibility (ok, more or less), the only time a small company would upgrade is when they purchase new equipment. They don't budget for software upgrades to the basic suite; they budget for PC upgrades and the software is free.
Where this is really going to hurt would be companies like the one I work for: we have a number of elderly computers that are perfectly adequate for word-whacking in Win95/Office95, and woefully inadequate for Win2k/Off2k. So the cost of upgrading isn't the cost of the software anymore. It's the cost of a new box PLUS the software.
Next: State clearly that this is your corporate desktop prototype that will be ready in three month and will be replacing all M$ shit! Make it very clear that you where just waiting for them to set totally unreasonable conditions until it's worthwile to scrap M$ entirely.
Wait for reasonable and cheaper offer from M$ to come in.
Ah, now just sit back and wait until M$ sends in the audit team to destroy your company through fines and fees. Then I think you'll be needing the ol' Free Operating System, plus a cardboard box to live in. Microsoft's kind of disgusting that way, huh.
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
Microsoft is so missing the mark. Windows XP, yeah whatever. Intentionally crippling Server 2002 so they can sell more Advanced Server licenses. And lets not forget the almost total failure of windows datacenter.
When someone yells "Stop" or goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over.
You might be trolling (or just dumb) but you can change nearly every single aspect of the Sawfish interface through the gnome control panel, or Sawfish's own config program (middle-click on desktop, Customize, All Setting).
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
I run a network for a govt agency. Lots of what M$ is doing with the various XPs is going to cost the taxpayer lots of $$$. So we're looking *very* seriously at migrating to StarOffice 6.x for our Office users. Access databases --> MySQL + PHP. Luckily, most of the supervisor types are WordPerfect users, so we don't have this idiotic blind allegience to Microsoft.
From the quoted CNET article:
There is still at least one huge area in which the MS product range could be made better - usability. Instead of concentrating on new bells and whistles, MS would do well IMO to concentrate on fixing the multitude of I-wish-it-didn't-do-that "features".
Perhaps then they might in the process convert people - like me - who are fed up to the back teeth of an OS that only has to be used because (almost) everyone else uses it.
P.S. Typo in the subject line isn't mine ;)
It would be way cool if this happened*, but it would take a lot of very enlightened politicians to do it (ie. snowball's chance in hell).
There may be a chance of the binaries getting released, but never the source (I suppose the source is a trade-secret, since they don't release it to consumers).
* IMO, the copyright should expire 12-24 months after I am no longer able to obtain said material legally for a reasonable price. Copyright is to protect the author's right to sell it, if he's not going to sell it to me, either he keeps it to himself (never releases it to begin with) or party is over.
Once they saturated the market, it wasn't possible to make a real profit on mainframes becase the market was actually shrinking. So, they deftly turned things around by putting the emphasis on the service side of the business. It turned out that IBM is still making a tidy profit on their Big Iron even though the industry is shrinking every year.
Maybe Microsoft envisions the same thing happening to its Windows franchise, or at least the server aspect of it. They need to keep the revenue stream moving, so subscription-based licenses make sense for that. The real signs of trouble from Microsoft will be if they start going around saying that they want to stress "Customer Satisfaction" and start rolling out extensive service packages. I'd guess they would call them something weak like "Enterprise Premium Support" or some such managmenet-speak.
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In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
However, I make a living programming proprietary "stuff" for our clients. We put copy protection in our programs because if we don't get paid for our work, then we can't keep working. We charge for our work and I will not apologize for doing so.
I know that Microsoft is flailing about trying to make money anywhere they can, but I do not necessarily hate the idea of charging people for your product.
This isn't some new conclusion to an old debate, just my musing out loud, sharing some thoughts with the world.
Lets say your company purchases 100 licenses for "Office 2002" for a 3 year subscription.
Two years later, Microsoft introduces "Office "2004".
And a year after that, your licenses expire.
Which will be in Microsoft's bests interests:
A. Renew your licenses for $100 per seat
B. Upgrade to the new product and get new licenses for $250 per seat
There are a couple of ways Microsoft could "encourage" consumers to upgrade to new products:
1. Make the renewal process slow, beaurocratic, and potentially painful.
"You can only renew subcriptions during the renewal period, which is 10 days before your licenses expire. There will be a 60 to 90 days processing period. You must send the full payment in advance. Microsoft reserves the right to do a full software audit during the processing period. If we find you are out of compliance, you forfeit the entire resubscription fee..."
2. Play games with the pricing structure.
"Why renew Office 2002 for $249.50 when you can upgrade to Office 2004 for an extra fifty cents!"
3. Change the rules in the middle of the game.
"Microsoft will no longer support resubscriptions for products that have been upgraded"
Competing Office Suites will be the first, as you might expect. Nobody uses all of the features of MS Word; I bet if this was formally studied you'd find %90 of users working with at most %20 of the functions.
Next will come a variety of translators which will allow non M$ products to read (and possibly write) the native Microsoft formats.
These tools will (and currently are) created by two distinct classes of firms; only the larger Corporations like Sun can resource up to build Office Suites, while smaller companies - maybe even open source projects - can handle the quite smaller file translators.
I don't see this helping M$ at all, as they are now trying to formally lock users into the constant upgrade cycle that they previously had to do via a bunch of arm twisting.
A message from our sponsor
I think more common still, from my past experience, are companies who say "we'll *try* to stay more-or-less compliant, but we're not going to devote the time and energy to make sure we're always 100% there". Given that a 100 person company can have twice that many systems - between desktops, sales laptops, extra systems, servers, etc - they'd end up tying IS to accounting and totally occupying people on both ends (if you're a 100 person company, you don't really have those people to spare, much less if you're smaller). So in practice, they'll periodically audit and buy "approximately" as many licenses as they're using.
:).
The prospect with the subscriptions, as well as UCITA-esque "monitoring and self-help" shutdown is that it would require a lot of extra effort from these companies to stay 100% on top of it, not that they'd end up buying many more licenses. (well, at least not for 3 years
just my $00.015.
I'm inclined to encourage MS to take this step. The reason, you ask? I think it's probably a bad idea for them in the long run. It reduces the barriers to entry and is likely to irritate corporate customers. Corporate customers are the ones they can't afford to irritate.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
This isn't a bad thing for alot of enterprise customers because of the crazy tricks accountants pull. IIRC purchased software is an asset that must be depreciated over time. Under this new scheme, the bean-counters will be more easily able to fiddle with the books. It's kind of the same argument for leasing PCs instead of purchasing them outright.
Then again, WTF do I know, I'm just a techie.
before Microsoft announced they weren't going to be using the subscription model with Office XP.
True most "Enterprise" applications are already running on a supcribtion basis. However, I wouldn't want my OS to be on a subscription basis. An OS is a basic fundamental part of a working system. I don't have a subscription for my Disk Drives or my NIC.
The admin cost for Mac and PC aren't that much different. The hardware costs less and the software is about the same price. Not that I think that you should switch, but I don't agree that it is going to cost you more in support if you do.
I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
My impression from the articles are that this is not a subscription. It's the license expiring. You have the SAME PRODUCT for three years, then are forced to the next one at the end of the period, at full cost.
Let's carry this a little further then, shall we?
You have a subscription to a magazine. The subscription runs out. You stop getting new issues. Are you forced to send in all of your old issues?
It's not.
But the cost of an "upgrade" from Office 97 used in 97 to Office 97 used in 2001 is currently free.
It won't be under MS's new plan.
Depreciation is over a five(?)year period for computer equipment. When you make a large capital purchase, you're not allowed to subtract all of it from your current earnings before paying taxes. Instead, you reduce your earnings (and taxes) every month by a fraction of the original purchase price, until the item is fully depreciated.
If you switch to a monthly licence, then you can deduct that amount from your earnings in that month. There are reasons to dislike the monthly charges, but it probably doesn't affect your taxes very much.
For large companies a steady payment steam is probably preferable. It keeps the accountants happy (they like steady payments) and the IT managers happy (no more fighting with the accountants for a software upgrade budget every 2-3 years).
In the home, people are different. A lot of casual users see a computer as a one-time buy (like a TV or a stereo). After 5 years or so, they upgrade everything. Generally, home users are more careful with their money.
This also has the effect of shifting their software business to a shorter business cycle. Before, people could be counted on to buy software and computers 5 years or so. Now people have to make what amounts to time payments. Guess what? In a recession or a business downturn, those are the first things to be eliminated. This might be good for Microsoft in the short term, but what about the long term? Sure they have LOTS of cash sitting around, but cash is meant to be put to work, not to shore up bad business plans in bad times. That's NOT good management.
Sounds great!
Maybe you should show them how you are putting dual Xeons with 512MB of ram on every desktop too, since even simple programs like Netscape requre massive amounts of memory to simply sit there and leak memory.
If you were halfway serious, you'd be talking about some Sun thin-client solution which could maybe replace Windows in an enterprise environment.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
"When you have an Windows XP on subscription and the software you have developed works on that platform, but than Windows XP2 comes out, forcing you to either develop a new version of your software pack, investing time and resources, or you could keep using Windows XP, but will have to keep paying!!"
That's sorta like when Redhat upgrades all packages to RPM v4, and you can waste 5 hours searching for a FTP site during the day, since rpmfind.net is unusable during business hours.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Microsoft wants to move to the 'software maintainance' model used by other enterprise vendors.
You pay a fixed licensing fee, then pay an additional fee to upgrade the software as new revisions come out. Costs remain fixed and spread out. Companies want this, because in the end they save money by being able to have predictable cash flow. This is why companies like GE lease everything, despite the additional finance costs associated with leasing.
This pricing model is nothing new either; Sun, Oracle, Informix, Peoplesoft, Lotus, etc all use this pricing model.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Further, though, I'm not too concerned for a variety of reasons. I actually *do* upgrade most of my software every 3 years, and if you ask most Linux users, they probably will agree. I upgrade my Windows machine infrequently, but I upgrade my Linux distro perhaps every 1-1.5 years. And I'm certainly no longer running Windows 95 or even 98 if I can help it. Second, and more importantly, if you don't like the situation you can always continue to use your favorite, non time-expired OS. Get a copy of Windows 2000 when it reaches a rock-bottom price (it's actually suprisingly stable). Or, continue to get Linux distros that will never have this scheme.
There will always be "another option" when it comes to time-limited software.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
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Yeah, until the NEXT time Microsoft changes the licensing scheme to suck more money out of its far-flung empire. Your assumption: "pay this non-stop forever and they dont have to ever worry..." in the context of Microsoft is a huge reach, IMO.
This is a good point. If ISPs are any indication, MS's plan will probably let them change the EULA (and price) with little-to-no warning and (naturally) leave subscribers with no recourse.
Companies would like to get the latest software,...
My experience has been that companies would rather standardize and leave it be. You mention 40% of businesses use Office 2k; that means that 60% don't want to upgrade.
Now, instead of paying for it all at once, maybe it'd be nice for them to pay $75/month for three years.
Nope. It's (to use your example) $75/month forever. Any company that decides it wants off the upgrade treadmill still has to continue paying.
I'm not sure why MS thinks this will help them
Just as much as their doing this encourages upgrading to current levels every 3 years, it gives me a chance to re-evaluate my needs and buy elsewhere.
If Office costs $500 and I'm only using 20% of the features, I could decide to not pay the 500 every three years, and look elsewhere.
Especially if Office isn't improving, only shifting the interface around, why should I sign up for the $1500 over three years plan?
Even if other suites go to this (Corel, Lotus (yes, I still count Corel)) they'll be cheaper overall and just as functional.
And if Star/OpenOffice improves in stability, speed, and compatibility, I'll be set anyways. (right now, star is unusable for me. too slow, and incompatible when saving to word with graphics in a document.)
AbiWord doesn't do badly either, but it has a ways to go- I'd like to see all of the menus activated, for one thing.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
The rental model is one thing, where you directly rent the software from MS.
But if I go into a sotore and buy something, is it going to time out on me in three years? it going to give me an error screen 3 years after activation? I can imagine all kinds of horror stories on this. Handled with hard ball tactics, this could for less rational folks into violence etc.
I for one, am glad I am getting up to speed on the *nix systems
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
While I personally steer clear of software with this kind of license (I tend to save up all of my pennies for a large one-time purchase) this is certainly nothing new.
With any luck they will use the horrible license manager 'lmgrd'... or at least have a rip-off. If you've ever dealt with buggy license managers before, I doubt you'll run out and buy something that employs it at the OS level. If you do, you get what you deserve.
:)
As for the folks who simply don't know better, a television ad campaign against lease-ware would be the best approach. Maybe IBM would help fund that.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Bonus : If worst comes to worst you're even able to pull off your threat
Setup: When the very junior M$ sales droid comes in delivering his blackma^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsales pitch, get nasty, kick him out and make very, very clear that you won't negotiate with anybody less then the boss of his boss.
In the meantime: Set up a really nice Linux box, focus on the desktop (enlightenment is nice), make sure that you can demo the whole range of Open Office apps; specifically conversions from M$ Office documents. Install the Opera browser and a few other nifty add ons, preferrably stuff that looks better then under Windows.
Next: State clearly that this is your corporate desktop prototype that will be ready in three month and will be replacing all M$ shit! Make it very clear that you where just waiting for them to set totally unreasonable conditions until it's worthwile to scrap M$ entirely.
Wait for reasonable and cheaper offer from M$ to come in.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
A side effect could be that Microsoft actually starts putting more weight on improving quality rather than adding new features, since there's no need to "lure" old customers to buy the new version - they will still pay for the subscription regardless of what version they are using.
On the contrary, is it not possible that, now that Microsoft have a much more predictable (and guaranteed) revenue stream, they will have less of an incentive to improve their product? Until now, at least they have had to add new features. What is to stop them from sitting on their backsides and doing nothing?
Of course, if a business gets too exasperated at Microsoft for a substandard product then it can switch to alternatives; but if it isn't doing that already, it would take more than just the current products staying static.
I suppose that we'll just have to wait till the alternatives get better; except that they are already - for example the Lotus office suite (which I have briefly used) is (IMHO) just as functional. So the main problem is the momentum that Microsoft products have, and this is not going to change if businesses do accept this new model.
No one else seems to have pointed out that subscription for software is nothing new; although maybe not in the mainstream OS and Office applications, specialized applications have licenses where you have to subscribe for a fixed amount of time.
For example, my department's license for an electronic CAD and simulation software expires in about a month, which we are all reminded of when we start it (in this case, the powers that be have decided to move to a different package, and so won't be renewing their dues).
Not exactly. Most MP3s are created by the end user, and therefore cannot have been stolen. That's not to say they aren't illegal. But they are certainly free.
___
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
Microsoft has the right to innovate! innovate innovate innovate!!
however, when they run out of innovative ideas for their products they start looking for innovative ways to bill...
hmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Silly slashdot, sigs are for kids!
I am not american, so I might be wrong on this one, but isn't there a tax deduction every three (or five) years for computer upgrades? If a company has to pay monthly licences, then that tax deduction would be useless.
Apparently around here anything MS have to get bashed. Now don't spoil their fun.
The reactions thus far have been almost all negative; the only way MS could convince people to pay for subscriptions is if the price was much lower than the current price of purchasing the software outright. I don't think it should be more than $9.95/month for one license. At $9.95/month I would prefer subscribing than purchasing Office XP.
Nope. It's (to use your example) $75/month forever. Any company that decides it wants off the upgrade treadmill still has to continue paying
Any company that decides to wants off the upgrade treadmill is a doomed company. Do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is for desktop publishers to deal with a company that have something like Office 4.2, PakeMaker 3, etc? And it gets even more painfull for helpdesk people. Yes the subscription model is the way to go, not only for MS but for other companies to. I think Adobe is starting on this road to.
people complain about MS as much as they complain about taxes and they both still exist.
The "Perpetual" license only would affect large companies that are currently using Micro$ofts "Enterprise License Agreement".
The "Enterprise agreement" allows companies with over 500 PC's the oportunity to use a M$ product on all of the systems while paying for the product over a period of three years. The product is substantually discounted. At the end of the three years the company owns the licenses it has paid for.
However, most companies don't remain on a single solution for much longer than three years. They upgrade. This article explains a licensing technique that would allow the companies to move into the upgrade product very easily.
Finally, read the last half of the article. This is just rumor and speculation at this time. Nothing is official yet. Again, this is the media jumping on a headline that hasn't been confirmed yet.
Big surprise. "How can we milk our monopoly more"? Guess this is the answer.
I'm not sure about the mail... But I think both Outlook and some of the Linux calendar apps (like the KDE one) can import/export to a Palm. I might be wrong here but it could be possible to export everything from Outlook into a Palm and then import it from the Palm to a Linux app.
Good luck, friend. The only thing still keeping ME with Windows is EverQuest. =)
Application software vendors like Ariba, Webmethods and many others have been doing it for the last 2-3 years. Many customers (CIOs) actually like the idea - though it is one thing to upgrade an OS or introduce a new OS into the company, it is another to replace an entire procurement app or a supply chain app. Wonder how many CIOs are prepared for that scenario? Does this also signal the coming of truly inter-changeable, replaceable applications? Hope so. It would be interesting to see how MS would react to that threat.
Well almost. Think about it. Who uses software that's three years old anyway? I mean - at my company, Office 97 is almost impossible to find anymore. Users want the latest and greatest. So we buy the newest version every year, anyway. If there had always been a three year expiration, we never would have noticed. Microsoft is just forcing those users who want to stick with old software to upgrade.
And as far as this helping to push people to Linux, etc. I don't think it will do that either. Most people are comfortable with what they know and are willing to pay to maintain the status quo. They're not going to want to have to learn a whole new O/S that has the reputation of being difficult to use and for which there is an apparent lack of software. I'll bet that people might bitch and moan, but in the end, they'll submit and pay up every three years or whatever. They're doing it already, but now it will be forced.
It looks like Microsoft is starting to play hardball over licensing - what with forced expiration and activation codes and so on. Maybe it's a good time to buy MSFT stock? They've probably decided the only way they can grow their revenue is by beating it out of people. And it will work.
Honestly, The Phoenix office of Bechtel, the HR department where I work, still uses 95. They're considering upgrading to 2000 sometime in the next year or two... maybey... Meanwhile, they're gonna stick to 95, and the won't let us use anything else, period. So how would companies like this, that just don't give a damn, or even small companies that don't want to upgrade... why would they even want to THINK about upgrading that way? I mean... honestly, if I have a company that's working just fine running the systems they're running, why would i want to bother upgrading my software to something even more ludicrously bloated, potentially unstable, and gives a very good reason to have to shove out tons of money to upgrade the internet connections? Then again, that's a good idea. Someone convince Bechtel to upgrade to XP and upgrade the internet connectivity for the Phoenix office. Currently we run through the most ugly firewall/proxy/run to another city setup. Yeah, in other words, I type a character, it goes from Phoenix, to San Francisco, to the rest of the net through who knows what size dsl connection (yeah, dsl) thus giving every phoenix user an average speed of 1.2k/sec... speedy like 14.4! So, if I were smart and I wanted to not spend much money, I wouldn't ever ever upgrade to that version of windows. What if Apple stays at the single-buy license system like they are now? I'd be inclined to stick with that company a bit more. From a business-minded standpoint, I'd also like to see Apple get OS/X running on x86 machines, simply to smoosh Microsoft.
[)(]subliminal labs[)(]
interesting, remember in days when IBM as and IBM
and Microsoft was Micro? =) Seems like Microsoft
wants to go back in time, as per-mainframe
licencing schemas, that are 20 years old,
but apply it to common user.
Linus took techology and core idea from 20 years
back. Microsoft took licencing ideas from 20 year
back. Things sure do change.
What are you talking about? With Oracle you do not have to keep paying. You have a choice: you can pay every year to get all the upgrades for your product (and by the way tech support is covered with this payment. And I mean real support - they help). But if you do not want to - do not pay, just use your product forever. And you have several plans to choose from. One of the plans - you can by a product for limited period of time. But this is option for you to choose, and you can choose another one. And if you do not like Oracle - go and buy DB2 or Sybase or whatever.. With Sun - you pay for extended warranty and better responce time and again - it is not 'must have' - basic warranty is there by default. The likelyhood of having of the new version of any of MS OS now depends on you - do you want to spend money now and buy newer version or you prefer to keep the old. With subscription it still does depend on how much do you spend but time does not depend on you anymore. When time has come PAY or stop using the thing. This is very different with vendors you have mentioned. Your Redmond friend will decide for you when do you spend money, how often and how much. If you do not like it - take a hike. I think it greatly limits your choice and that is why it is a bad thing.
MS is leasing software so that companies don't have to claim it as an asset, hence they don't pay as many taxes. Leased assets are even a tax deduction in most places.
I'm sure somebody who knows more about this will step in and correct me if I'm wrong. I welcome that.
Keeping
I'd say relative value is more important. I work for a large international bank, and these guys throw around mere thousands of dollars like you and I would that quarter.
these stories help reinforce the need for open source systems. one of the big reasons companies are reluctant to use open source systems is the percieved lack of support contracts. they instead choose to use systems from corporations such as MS because they will also offer some support contract that will most likely never be used, or won't amount to anything. do they examine the system dumps and provide some sort of explanation as to why the system was allowed to crash? Does RedHat/Apache provide such support options?
There's still a better way how Microsoft could do it: Install a little coin-eating device on your desk, and let that control the use of your computer. For a half our computer use you would have to insert a 50 cent coin into the device. Power shuts off if your time is used up...
Why should I have to pay for software twice, eh?
Well..
A quick run down of the software I'm using at the moment has shown me that all of it is under 3 years old, with the exception of a couple of NT servers. The idea that people will have to carry on paying for software years after they've bought it isn't new (Ask any Sun/SGI/Oracle user). This sort of thing pushes people into paying more money for software, true, but it also means they're considerably more likely to use more up-to-date versions, have less support/maintainance issues, and generally be happier.
Sure, it'll never work for the home user, but that's not what they're aiming at.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
Hmm.. I agree with your point, but as I understand the new MS Scheme isn't a pay by month type system, but more of a pay the $5M up front, then pay another $5M in three years.
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
Mind you that most MP3s are not free, just stolen.
For many companies and institutions software subscription can be a pretty good thing. It is quite common to lease hardware for the simple reason that it is easier to control costs that way.
.NET for its customers and MS has continous costs for these services of course it makes sense for MS to charge not only at the time of purchase. But on the other hand: with the same kind of argument the delivery of the OS to a customer means very small costs for MS, so why should the charge for it at all then?
Software gets outdated fast. A subscription instead of a one-time license should make upgrading more simple. Site licenses already do this more or less (pay per server per year).
For individual persons the idea of having to pay again for using the same old software is less appealing. Individuals have no yearly budget for IT-expenses, and surely dont want one either.
ADSL/Cable etc are giving people flat-rate internet access (at least where I live) and this is much better than a cost per minute. Having to pay subscriptions for software is like moving in the other direction.
It will probably be difficult for MS to gain acceptance for software subscriptions among private customers, and I doubt most peaple will pay subscriptions. If MS enforces people to pay subscriptions in some way or another, I'd say most people would get very annoyed. Mostly because their software would stop working for "no good reason".
Since MS is offering services such as
No, this way Balmer can say "uh, we meant to do that."
I think you have hit the nail on the head. I am sure that removing the ability to pirate software will bring down Microsoft. Here in the UK I have often been to offices and tried to fix a network problem, asked the guys in the office if they have a Windows 98 machine to be told, "no, but I think we have a Windows 95 CD somewhere." You then realise they are illegally running 20-30 machines in their office. This is just so common.
If people can no longer pirate the software so easily then people will seek alternatives. Whats more, non-Western countries will be even harder hit. I have been to may countries in Asia and the Middle East where it is very difficult to buy orignals. I once went into a computer shop in Pakistan whilst on a contract there. I asked them for a Windows 98 CD and they came with a pirate. I asked them for an original and they said they don't sell the originals.
In short, people just can't afford to pay for original software. I am sure everyone out their has copied some software illegally at some point.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
The reason for this is of course that with software it doesn't cost you more to build 1,000,000 instances than the first one. But you still want a steady and predictable revenue for years to come. SAP, Oracle, Siebel, everyone charges this way. Also, customer seem to prefer this way, since it makes their initial investment smaller.
When it comes to pulling the plug after 3 years, this also is the case with enterprise software. It is called "de-supporting", which means that the customer needs to upgrade to a newer version (for a fee) in order to receive the support he's paying for. Typically vendors support their product 3 versions back, and come with a major release every 2 years or so.
What MS is doing is just moving their price model to the one that the major players on the large systems market are using. They can probably get the companies to pay for this, since most companies write off and replace their PC every 3 years. When it comes to people using PCs at home, I guess it'll be tougher, but perhaps MS figures people switch their system about that often.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
I guess MS see it this way...
Right now, people (I prefer "people" to "consumers") have the option of upgrading from Windows 95 to 98 or ME and Microsoft can't exactly brute-force new evils into them. If things were done with subscriptions, MS could halt renewal of subscriptions for Windows 95 and then force everyone into 98/ME.
They have TOTAL control over their software after it's been released now. Users are at their mercy.
Well said:
"Software rental is a bad idea for the same reason ASPs are a bad idea: you're giving up control of something fundamental to someone who has interests other than yours."
Bush's education improvements were
This subsciption scheme is just a symptom of a larger illness.
Microsoft is a rapidly dying company.
Bush's education improvements were
If Microsoft only sells new versions of their software via time limited subscriptions they will be forcing a large segment of the computing world to keep their last unlimited copies in use forever. So Windows 95/98/ME and NT/W2K will be around for a very long time. The real question is what happens when someone buys a new computer. Does their PC stop working after 3 years if they don't pay Microsoft? Business may or may not put up with this, but I predict that consumers simply won't have it. I hope Microsoft indeed puts this bad idea into effect, it will give other OS's a big boost. No doubt Linux, StarOffice and WordPerfect will be the winners here.
I'm scared of world leaders who think locally and act globally.
I'm oldfashioned
I still think that when I buy a product, it's mine.
As long as I don't cause anyone harm with it, I can do what I like with it.. I paid for it, it's mine. Any Lockian-based support here?
Now we buy with strings attached.. how did the land of amazing consumerism let this happen? Seems like corporatism winning out with the dot-com craziness that's finally burst.
Hopefully now, consumer rights will be back in the forefront while we save our pennies.
-Nowt
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? - Joshua (Wargames)
Three years are up and you go to re-license the software because Microsoft has been nagging your ass with pop-up messages in Windows, little .sigs declaring that you're a license deadbeat in all financial transactions you make through .NET -- y'know, the subtle stuff -- until you pay.
Gosh, shocker. DildoDraw 02 is no longer available. But for the same price you can upgrade to DildoDraw 05 -- it's even easier to use! Of course, for optimal performance, you'll need to update your operating system, CPU, income level, etc.
should be sent directly to the auditing group, saving Microsoft the time to forward your company's account information for a compliance check.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
stupid office crapola.... I get so many emails that have 'Word' attachments for really short messages, like one sentence. Forcing me to turn on Word as my email editor to be sure I don't miss half of the message.
they still got us using Win95 and are going straight to win 2000 this year.
I hate word docs, why can't the world use HTML? there's this big corporate intranet information resource, and as you browse through the web pages and click on a link for info, all of a sudden you're looking at an excel spreadsheet in your browser, god it makes me sick. How do I copy info from a spreadsheet to share with someone else and have be readable in plain text email? I get this constant flow of Virus warnings, don't open emails that say this or that, someone always does and I get all this crap in my inbox from viruses reading the corporate email directory. Here's another big one: OUTLOOK WON"T LET ME BLOCK BCC MESSAGES. you know what that means, no junk filtering, what a load of crap for a supposedly great email app. I begged IT to let me use a different client for my mail and it's juast too much for them to comprehend/ and or think about. all this bullshit and all kinds of other problems with this upgrade breaking that application ansd so on and so forth. I work at an ISP as tech support and we cannot have the "Branded client browser" on our desks because it breaks some features in IE used for the company intranet (this is why we're still on Win95) I'm supposed to be an expert in using this branded browser but I've never used it except once in training.
I feel sorry for those misguided IT folks who are now lost in a world of MS framework that just pulls them deeper and deeper every day into this "framework" FMS!!!
anyone want to start work on an informational kit "IT recovery package" to dig these companies out of the hole they're in?
we could package 10-20 different distributions (a few copies of each) along with highlights and reviews on each one, a guide to migration and a heading that reads: "you can be the hero that dug your corporation out from the MS trap....read on"
you know there would be a big award ceremony..."IT Joe has saved the company 10 million dollars this year, and every year from now on, by moving to Linux!!!" here's your plastic budget busters trophy!!!.
we are the world, we are the children, we can lead the way for all the Lusers!!! God I hate Ms!!!
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Now we have to face incompatibilities, more training, more resources and other hidden costs that could have otherwise been saved if we could just stick with the software that worked.
The cost of doing business with MS is amazingly steep IMHO. As times get lean and jobs are axed, I can't wait for my company to realize that MS is not worth the money.
m.mmm..myyy
It occurs to me that this would be an incentive to computer manufacturers to continue selling computers with Windows pre-installed. Computer companies now are having problems with people keeping their computers too long, 5 or 6 years (and longer.) What an incentive to upgrade your PC if the operating system doesn't work anymore. And if you're a computer manufacturer, wouldn't you want your machine to need replacing after 3 years...especially if it's "not our fault... that's just how Windows is..." You get customers being forced to buy your hardware again, you don't have to continue supporting old hardware, AND it's not your fault. I know I'd be tempted...
I really wonder if this move will change anything. I imagine most IT managers upgrade their software at least once every three years- in that case, it won't cost them any more, and for those locked into a Microsoft-centric environment there aren't likely to be many other options anyway.
As for home users, who really reads their license agreements? Unless Microsoft makes this really vocal (and if they do, it'll be a 'feature') I doubt it'll change how the average user buys software, either.
Love justice; desire mercy.
What planet are you on, and what companies have you worked for? As a software consultant I've been at several large companies, each with several thousand users and PCs. When you walk in the door you get a cookie-cutter PC from the PC admin group, complete with licensed applications and OS. They generally use SMS to audit and distribute software. When you want to upgrade or add software you talk to the procurement department and they get you the latest.
It's not the companies' attitude toward software that generates the fines. It's generally the rogue developer or user who thinks they're too important to wait for the system to get them what they need.
Part of procedures, either office tasks or software design, should include the evaluation of necessary software. If you find yourself up against a deadline because you don't have the tools you need, you've skipped a step.
- Sig this!
From the article: "Microsoft is finding it harder and harder to develop products that compel people to migrate," and that is exactly the reason. They just could not come up with a new feature set for Office every two or three year and, damn, I could understand this - I do not have enough imagination either. Isn't this a great problem of software buiseness as a whole - there are only limited number of general task to be solved for general customer and after some stage existing solutions are good enough for most of the people? No need for anything new for general customers? Well, on the other hand, closes of the last century is more or less as good as contemporary ones, but haute couture and designers are still there... Wait for new spring collection from Gates! Crio
After two years, many new PC's have been carried in, all receiving their installation of software. The money stream grows a bit, but that's OK, as it can be anticipated.
After three years, the initial software expires! In stead of chosing to hold off on an upgrade, the corporation is *forced* into an upgrade! From that moment on, they'll be in a constant upgrade threadmill while software packages expire on them, left right and centre... Now they have three money streams to deal with:
1. The rental stream, nice and steady
2. The upgrade support cost, ever growing...
3. The IT staff recruitment cost, as IT folkes doing nothing but forced upgrades will run away so quickly, there's no way to get them in fast enough
This is the scenario for just the Office suite being rental-based. Add your own selection of other tools, and picture the nightmare...
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
No. It's not necessarily a copyright violation, either. It may be simply be "fair use", non-commercial trading of audio, as loosely defined in the Home Audio Recording Act. Granted, it's happening on a grand scale, beyond anything that Congress ever envisoned. Then again, so is the nonsense of DMCA.
That they are using the license now is just a new wrinkle. Their products aren't impressing anyone, the IT world is sick of them, and they are sliding downhill. Of course they turn to their lawyers now.
- Dan I.
microsoft is not an evil company.But this isn't a good thing, I myself am a very cheap person and like Microsoft NT server on my machine. Now i'll probably have to waste $200 (i think) on a new lisence.
Simple, but genuine comment: Thank God for open source. This move from Microsoft can only reduce their popularity, and perhaps more persons (both for personal use and business use) may choose another open and free platform. The culture that writes their own software for the greater good can only grow.
You _think_ - I know. Small company sys admin here - we MUST use 3 popular PCB CAD tools in our business, all of which are paid for on a plan similar to the one proposed . . .you can use the software forever, but to be eligible for maint. or upgrade, you must pay an annual licensing fee.
Now, I don't begrudge that for the tools - they are complicated apps, and the authors deserve to be compensated.
But our lic. fee gives us access to efficient tech support, a not bad set of knowledge bases, etc. etc.
And the annual hooraw we go through each year (3 diff. times) just to make sure we're purchasing the right tool sets for our needs, and keeping all of it straight . . . it's not pretty.
Display some adaptability.
So those users who don't really like windows simplistic and limited interface paradigm can make things work properly. Why not have a WM that acts like windows? There are several - E amongst them (you just have to configure it accordinly). KWM, and FVWM95 are also very windowsesque.
I'd like to know why you are so desperate to reimplement the windows interface? What is quite so good about it that E or Sawfish won't do? I can, if I want to, make either E or Sawfish behave like windows - but I don't. I rather like window shading (taskbars annoy me, and take up valubale space I like to use, I prefer root window taskmenus etc), especially multi-direction window shading (I can easily maintain a 2 function setup on a single desk by using side and vertical shading for the different groups - of course, I could always (and tend to) use window groups anyway). I rather like having titlebars that don't span the window (hooray for BeOS). I rather like being able to minimize apps to a shaded iconbox when I really don't need it for a while. I can't live without multiple desktops (and hence quality pagers, sticky windows, send_to_desktop win_ops options etc.)
I have gone to a lot of trouble to get my WinNT machine at work to emulate as much of this behaviour as possible.
I'll reiterate: Why do we have all these interface options and themes? Because a lot of people like them. Most people I know who actually bother to learn E or sawfish don't go back.
For one you can't alter the titlebar buttons, and double clicking on the titlebar itself makes the window "shade."
Let's check what I said: "Most people I know who actually bother to learn E or sawfish don't go back." - it's pretty clear from the above complaint that you have no real clues about sawfish. All of the "annoying" behaviour you list can be customised to suit your needs. If you don't like shading, simply turn it off.
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
2) The only other reason for a subscription service is to provide customer support, but since Microsoft's GUI is so good, the main problem is not in using the software, but in dealing with the bugs, which Microsoft doesn't usually know how to do either. So they can't really provide any customer support.
So basically, it boils down to a plan through which they get more money without providing anything more. That's just not going to fly.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Even our desktop applications are leased and this is the way the bean counters like it. I'm sure there's some legal tax dodge involved or some figment of Wall Streets imagination that makes this look better on the books.
There's no mention that this will be enforced on small companies, of course, this could change.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
It seems like M$ has been coming to terms with its inability to innovate for awhile. I can remember seeing some interview with Bill Gates where he says that M$ could go out of business in five years, this is how this industry works (shocking the talk show host). Maybe he was serious, I mean, what more can be done for office software? If they can't continue to sell upgrades because significant improvements have been made, they'll just have to lock customers into a pay me once, pay me twice, pay me three times model like this.
Microsoft is funny because they seem to think that if they are not outright dominating everything about the computer, they are failing. I can't imagine any "common sense" businessman is going to be interested in paying for something more than once.
But look at all the new bloat Microsoft can add! They can make Office actually save in universal documented free formats!They can stop the stupid system from crashing over obvious bugs which have been in place for years! They can make it more useful for the average user!
But since that will never happen, expect all sorts of crap to be added to "justify" every hick and his inbred cousin to use the product. Or most likely, "New from Microsoft Innovation Labs - The 3D DirectX Helpful Paperclip! Now with a more enthusiastic Gilbert Godfrey voice! In fact, you'll have to use the Talking Paperclip to input each and every letter and our helpful Paperclip will explain where each and every key on your keyboard is along with our delightful pop-up full-motion 1280 x 1024 animation windows!"
Can we start an EBAY bounty for the head of Bill Gates yet? It'd be like a raffle. Buy tickets, donate to the bounty hunter fund, and decapitate Bill Gates. The bounty hunter that brings back the head wins the money and the raffle winner gets the head of the most unethical computer billionaire next to Steve Jobs.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
I work at a company doing IC design, and basically all of our tools use this model. Some sample tools/companies: HSpice (Avant!), Powermill (Synopsys), Calibre (Mentor Graphics), VSS (Synopsys), HSim (Nassda), Virtuoso (Cadence), etc, etc. Everyone uses this scheme. Most of our software has to be renewed every year (and for a much larger fee than MS charges for Windows/Office/etc, I might add).
For the average medium-to-large business, this really is not a big deal. Where this change might be more of a problem is the smaller, mom and pop businesses, who can barely afford the software once. But after three years, it's really time to upgrade anyway.
Anyway, the point is look beyond the PC market and you'll see that this concept has been in use for many years. PC users are just used to getting things cheap. Not that MS products are cheap (in fact, I'd say they're disgustingly overpriced), but in the business world, subscriptions aren't a big deal.
"Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot." - Unknown Author
First, I guess you wont have to worry about paying up 3 years from purchase, because in 3 years I'm betting your software will not only be stale (and eveyone else is using opensource) but you'll be out of business.
Where is windows going? Down the damn drain if even the desktop users are opting out. Not to mention the security.
I got OpenSource Magazine, and what I read in there (although just seeing a SAN would be a treat) the enterprise (not the ship) market is saying fuck you Microsoft.
You think maybe since AOL and Netscape (seprate at a time) sued the Seattle Giant - they will go towards opensource? Where is AOL for Linux?
They'd have a niche market - install a rpm (.deb etc) and have the whole net simplified.
Where is Linux on Brand New PC's?
Get your Unix fortune now!
during a computer crash your soundcard detected the words "Damn microsoft". This is not allowed by the contract you have signed with microsoft. This seems like a great violation of the license, and Microsoft is forced to take action.
Your agreement with microsoft has hereby been cancelled. You are allowed to use this software for another month, after that time it will self destruct.
We hope that you in the future will help us promoting the wonderful world of Microsoft programs, and not ever again curse windows for crashing.
You might apply for a new contract after 12 months
Who says all mp3s are illegal copies of music? Music groups use them too to get seen online, or for their own personal use. Its not mp3s that are illegal, but the kind of music and copyright that is behind a certain mp3
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
How many Windows and Office users are still using windows 95 or office 95? I just installed RH 7.1 last night. It's a perpetual upgrade cycle to get the newest and the best. I guess I don't grouse about upgrading my linux machine because it's free to do so. -ted
Microsoft can only get away with the "subscription" model if in fact they are a monopoly. Otherwise who on Earth would want it? Would you buy a car you had to "renew" every third year?
People need to know that other OSes are in fact pretty nice these days, and they don't have to put up with this.
There are millions of .doc files all over the world, which can only be read well with... word. And don't come with AbiWord or StarOffice. One linked or embedded file and bye bye StarOfice.
There are millions of users trained in using Office products. It is too expensive (and too difficult!!) to retrain people. I am afraid a lot of users don't WANT to be retrained.. Word works for them.
Of course this model will have its problems and limitations, but in the end it is a better business model for Microsoft. I just don't want to think about what could happen... just think about a business in financial problems. No upgrade money = no software = no business. Renting is bad... you always pay too much.
Which i don't think is in the long term interest of MS (like i care). Many people have mentioned a lot of software uses a licensing model, but this is almost always software used by businesses. How many home systems use the model save for quicken and few others that really need yearly updates? People will want to use at work what they use at home. If people can't afford MS at home they will eventually drive out MS at work. MS would be smart to give away their systems to home users.
Microsoft could try this, but everyone is going to hate it, even if by some fluke it were actually more economical to everyone. The perception of the thing will be so negative it will have people flocking to alternatives in droves.
More importantly, when renewal time comes around people will be forced to consider the choice, wheras now they don't really think about it. How many do you think are going to choose microsoft when the time comes, especially if their monopolies are weakened?
cryptochrome
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Enterprise = corporate users
Home users won't have to worry -- Microsoft would never give another company an in via home use. Requiring home users to re-subscribe would invite competition for Office Suite products that weren't subscription, and they would win over MS and MS knows it. Win at home, and then win at work.
Therefore, we may conclude with mathematical certitude that Microsoft will not be applying this to home machines.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
"well, just make a few copies of [Microsoft Product] and install it .... then do a software audit and we will license the products before the Business Software Allaince comes and raids us....but don't bother buying the licenses at first - just copy the software and install it..."
Yes, that's illegal, but in reality that's what happens at 9/10 companies...companies aren't organized and they need flexibility in this area...I think if Microsoft tries and forces this draconian licensing system on them, they will end up with customers that are taking a closer look at the alternatives...if MS does this, how quickly will it drive business toward an alternative like ... say ... Linux?
What intrigues me is whether they intend to do the same with home users? After all, if you're sold a computer with an OS that "expires" after a certain date, then Microsoft had better make damned sure you're going to be willing to renew your licence which means they'd genuinely have more incentive to compete against other platforms than they do today.
Does Microsoft currently care what Be does? Or QNX? Probably not. After all, they already force the vast majority of people to buy Windows. But in an environment in which Windows has to be bought, rather than is just bundled, the rivals have a way in...
--
KMSMA (WWBD?)
Free Software.
http://www.fsf.org/
Consider the possible implications this may have for customer service. As it stands now, we purchase a software license for a fixed price, say, $500. M$ has now made their money. Until you upgrade, all you do is cut into that price. Every download, every update, every call to support... costing them money.
While it's not a guarantee, this model has the possibility of changing that. If we're renting the license, we are therefore providing a constant revenue stream. Now, customer support isn't cutting into a fixed purchase price, but essentially pre-sales on the next license.
It's like when I go to a restaurant. I may pay the bill 15 minutes before I leave, but I never leave the tip until I've stood up. Otherwise, what incentive do they have to continue taking care of me?
michael
/global33/
"Now your personal documents should be fine, I think having freely available unrestricted viewers is a good idea, as is having the specifications open to other programs so they can open and edit the stuff as well. That should suit your needs, don't you agree?"
That would work, yes .. I'm just not convinced, though, that there will always be such a thing as "free viewers". I think free viewers exist mostly only as a result of competitive pressure - if an ASP has a stranglehold on a market, they don't have to provide a free viewer - if they know you're really going to want to view your document, they're going to think "hey, this guy wants to view some documents, and we can make a bit of extra money here".
As someone who works in a small business, I must disagree with you - I think that subscriptions are more likely to appeal to large companies. The reason is, in a small company (ours at any rate), a lot of the software that gets used is only used fairly intermittently - sometimes a piece of software only needs to be "pulled off the shelf" maybe once or twice a year. For example, we developed a Windows CE application for a client. That requires the Windows CE toolkit. The project has long since been delivered, but needs the odd bit of maintenance maybe once or twice a year for a day or two. This may be even less frequent in the years to come. Subscription would be deadly. Do we keep subscribed and pay continually for software we essentially don't use, just because we once in a while need to fix some tiny bug? What if we don't need to use the software for the next five years, but then suddenly need to? Do we resubscribe if we've unsubscribed? Chances are the version we used won't even be compatible anymore. Right now its easy - I have a hard disk with the toolkit installed and when I need to do maintenance, I just plug it in and go. Under subscription, I would most likely have to download the new version, and spend days (possibly weeks) trying to just get my project to compile.
A lot of other software is also used far more sporadically than it would be in a large company. We have a legit copy of Adobe photoshop, for example, for doing the company web page. But we only update the company web page two or three times a year maybe. The rest of the time the software is not being used. Should we pay every month we don't use it? What if we stop our subscription for some reason, but need to open the .psd files six months later for some reason? At least with "owned" software, you just reinstall the software and open the documents, no problem.
What if I have some personal documents saved in some format, but don't actively use the software anymore? What if I want to open those documents ten years from now? Do I shell out for a new subscription? I'm sure most of us have documents backed up on CDs from years ago for software we don't really use anymore.
Lets face it, the only groups who will find the subscription model appealing are the application providers. They are the only ones who will greatly benefit from the model, and the only reason they'll be able to push it on people in the medium term is that currently the software industry is controlled by the vendors, not the clients, i.e. "what Microsoft says, goes".
Well and the bits and bytes of the MP3 are only just bits and bytes and can't be stolen as well. But it's the content! And that *is* stolen in the vast majority of MP3's, so GroovBird is right. What was the other example of freebies? Ah, MS Office software... Hmm, how exactly is office software free right now? Exactly - when it is stolen too. So what BaconBoy99 says is: People are used to stealing MP3 songs and stealing MS Word, so they won't go for a subscription model. Right - for all those people who steal software anyway. For corporate users the subscription model makes perfect sense.
Once people have had a taste of something free, they don't want to have a new set of rules that makes things not free. It hasn't worked for mp3's and subscriptionware will be the same.
I really hope the slashdot crowd will not nag about this one since software-as-a-service is what they want.
Or 60% dont have time to upgrade. Managing your installed software base often is the biggest costs.
What would you do if you were a big corporation, bloated on the carcasses of your vanquished competitors, and suddenly you discovered a.: you were intellectually bankrupt, b.: your business plan had painted you into a cybernetic corner, and c.: your heretofore monolithic business model, upon which your monopoly was based, was fatally cracked?
What would you do if you discovered you were circulating more bug fixes, er, uh, "system patches", than actual OS installation disks?
In short, what would you do if your gravy train had reached the end of the tracks and you still had a trainload of passengers suckin at yer teat?
BINGO! Slip a paradigm shift past 'em, and make 'em think it's the new "IN" thing! Make 'em pay for their ticket a second time! A third time! Ad nauseum....
What a rip, if I do say so myself...
As it stands, I work for a public library, which is in turn a member of a library cooperative with over 60 member libraries. I have a sneaking suspicion that MS won't just charge the big corporations. I'll bet member libraries will have to up their software budgets in order to pay a future toll to the Redmond Troll.
They admit that in the future they will be a "services"-oriented company (odd, considering the service they provide... but I digress).
Color me silly, but maybe I'll look for ways around using Windows for our public stations. Nyah, Bill.
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
In the Enterprise world, I'm currently faced with searching for a "sales force automation" tool. I've researched about 30 different providers, and the ones that offer a truly Enterprise level software package all seem to be selling them with yearly renewable licenses.... nothing more, nothing less. They are guaranteeing upgrades at least every 12 months, and free phone support for 10 hours a month in general, some more... some less. Most ASP's operate this way as well. Something I remember being offered by one provider was the option to purchase the source code for 4 times the yeary operating license fee, if the company goes out of business... Anyone thing Microsoft will offer this?
Believe it or not, I think many small/medium and even large size companies like the idea of subscriptions. The cost of software can be easily predicted, ...
Uh, I had to laugh at that.
What if Microsoft decides to rise prices in the future? Even if Microsoft guarantees a fixed price for a long time, what if they unbundle some important parts of their programs ("Excel has become such an big program that it will no longer be part of Office 2005 and will be sold as a standalone product")...
"[..] I think this will make MS software more attractive [..]"
Why? The subscription-model exists already: It's called "buy every upgrade no matter how much MS charges for it".
Now MS-using companies have 3 choices: subscription/buy-every-upgrade or upgrade seldom or stop using MS.
Effectively, Microsoft is just eliminating one of those 3 choices.
Could it be possible that Microsoft sells WindowsXP as the "last non-subscription" product? Many people would by Windows XP to avoid subscription. Maybe this is just a marketing trick?
And of course Windows 2002 and Windows 2004 would also be the last non-subscription product, just like Windows 98 was the last Win9x based OS ;-)
I think sooner or later, people are going to figure out that this is a bad deal. And that's good for Linux.
1) Every three years now, I will have a damn good excuse to talk to management about the virtues of open-source.
2) The drawback - many management types will LIKE this... They can amortize the costs over many years, and if my COMPANY buys a subscription, it won't be part of my ORGANIZATIONS budget within the company, so to my immediate boss, it will appear free. (The same things happen with Oracle licenses - if a company has an oracle site license, the organizations within the company perceive Oracle as being 'free' to use because they don't have to think of it in their budget.)
My limited understanding is that you need to (or at least some types of organizations need to) expense the costs of any asset, software included, out over a period of years. This spreads the costs out across income from a longer time period, typically the expected life of the asset.
In my world we might shell out a few million of real cash for software in one year but then expense it over a period of 3 or 5 years against our income in those years.
But then I might be missing the whole point, because as I said, IANAA.
How about this for software distribution:
Give people the choice of selecting either a "buy everything and own it forever plan, while paying for future updates" or "lease the application, and as long as you pay a subscription fee you can keep using the latest version of the application".
That way, we have the choice of buying or renting the software according to our needs (for example, I might want to simply rent the software initially at a very low cost, and if I like it I might just buy it forever).
I think that's a reasonable compromise.
The intersting part of the MSDN license is that while you pay anually that's just for getting updates. You can still use the software you already have when the license expires...
The big question is whether important customers will sign on to this (especially in the light of an expanding Linux base), go to the competition, or just keep on using the older versions that let them do what they will.
I remember way back when in the early 90's, when OEM liscences weren't tied to a particular machine... and we didn't even have these new-fangled 28.8 modems, either!
Of course, this is only my 2 cents, which by the time of reading will only be worth 1/10 of a cent.
GreyPoopon
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
It's rather dificult to install Windows on any Mac
Actually, I have more working installations of Windows on my Macintosh than I do on my AMD box. I always find it amusing how it much easier it is to install Windows under emulation than on native hardware.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
Does "enterprise" apply to schools who use Windows? Private schools who use windows? What all does enterprise encompass?
I bought office 2000 a while back as a student (student edition), it has nothing different in it than the regular office 2000 except that I have to call in to register all the time (no not office XP, but office 2000 has this feature).
Only recently when I've called up (so I can install on some new hardware I've bought), can I have the *option* of giving my personal information (like my address/phone). But they already have that info on me! Grrrr...
Well that leads me to say, I hope in a couple of years when I go to use reinstall this software (I know I'll have to), because I refuse to buy the latest M$ softwhore..... will they tell me, that I'm no longer a student & must upgrade????
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
Once again, this is not an original Microsoft idea: There are quite a few high-end software tools around that require regular payments.
I think this is not bad by default: Imagine you're admin in a company that needs, by some reasons, to be up-to-date on Microsoft software. Right now, you'd have to buy an update whenever it appeared, making your cost highly unpredictable. The new model makes it a lot easier to take software licences into your financial plans, it's just like a subscription to a magazine.
...just buy the one that we don't have to pay for again in three years.
People have been renting flats for centuries. More aptly, they've been renting cars for decades. In fact, don't most cars these days have planned obsolescence built in? The obvious solution is for Microsoft to offer their software on a hire-purchase scheme...
A subscription model would provide a good incentive for MS to keep their app slim and trim. Currently each new product version has higher minimum hardware requirements than the last. That's not a problem as corporations typically either get new versions loaded on new computers, or replace their machines at the same time (or every other time). If they were subscribing, however, one imagines the product being used on the same hardware longer, being progressively upgraded, and users would not be pleased if it got progressively slower.
It's rather dificult to install Windows on any Mac
Reboot macht Frei.
Hey no fair! If we're playing that game, the how about loading windows under eemulation on Linux, the loading mac under that, then loading Amiga under that, and finally, loading a gameboy under Amiga!
Reboot macht Frei.
... if this payment method is going to be mainstream, the Linux/GNU model is going to become more and more attractive to both the enterprises and the small companies...
----
--
[insert witty one-liner here for your own pleasure]
The thing is, Apple has already released their outdated operating systems to the public domain. They know that there is no point in keeping them.
Actually, M$ already does something similar to this. Assuming that you can't find the answer in their wonderful knowledge base, or just aren't willing to waste the time with it, you can call M$ tech support. And before they even ask you "How can we help you?", they ask, "What's your credit card number?" And last time I checked (and it has been a bit, so this may be a touch out of date.) each incident cost $100 to open. M$ isn't really hurting for money, they just want another steady stream of income. Afterall, techs like myself are doing our best to get that income in our own pockets. While I will agree that M$ is a money grubbing monster, they are actually a good thing for techs. If everything worked all the time, and was easy to use, I and many other techs would be out of a job quickly. I fix Winslow NT 4.0 problems day in and day out, and make a good paycheck doing it. Why? Beacuse M$ releases a buggy piece of junk software that needs constant attention. Not to mention my own company's software, which is great, if you can configure the damn thing right.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
While this might be a bit of a slippery slope falicy, it is still worth mentioning. M$ claims that this is only for some enterprise contracts. But let us look forward in time. Assume for a minute that this takes off and large companies start using it. The next step would be for M$ to come out with the small business license. It would conatain smaller numbers of licenses, for a lower per anum cost. After all, the small business market is a huge market, and this would really rake in the profits. Once established in the small business market, M$ need only roll this into their next product for the home user, who will accept it as the accepted standard (they see it everyday at work). Its a slow process, sure. But 6 to 10 years is acceptable to force the entire market over to the subscription model. And great for profits.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
It always seems much of the software I've used goes through a cycle. Software starts with promise. But then it reaches a point of "perfection" where no real improvements can be made. So either the software is not updated anymore so a future OS breaks it. Or just turns into bloatware.
Seems open source software might be the answer. Just reach that point of "perfection" and end it there. Just minor tweaks for the future. And no need to totally rebuild software every few years.
When everyone is forced to subscribe, does this mean that Microsoft will no longer have to develope new versions of their products, since money is going to come in anyway? Everyone knows that Microsoft currently developes new versions of their product so that people will spend money on upgrading, this is their only way of squeezing money out of the customers they already have. You would probably see layoffs in software engineers in Microsoft and more people hired in the sales department to track all the subscriptions, send out the invoices, and ensuring that those customers who have stopped paying the subscription are no longer running M$ softwares. And in a couple of years, other alternatives will quickly catch up and become better than whatever M$ can offer, and the whole world wakes up and realise that M$ is bad and open source software is good.
The boys in Redmond are loosing there grip on reality. I remeber some one saying Microsoft today is where IBM was ten years ago. Back then IBM started to loose it and tried forcing customers and re-sellers into doing things there way. It back fired and IBM went through a glut.
MS is starting down the same road. They are defending themselves against anti-trust accusations in the US and soon in Europe. They are a monopoly junkie that's loosing there power. As customers get pissed at new subscription fee's, forced upgrades, and buggy software that isn't security proof they will drive customers away. This is just one more sign of Redmond loosing touch.
After a few years Microsoft will smarten up and become a friendly company that isn't paroniod about controlling the market. But we are going to see a few more years of these crazy schemes from Redmond. All the better for Open source alternitives to show there better.
I agree completely. The boys in Redmond don't know right now what there doing. There like IBM was back in the ealy 90's. It's like watching a junkie go through withdrawel. MS is loosing there monopoly power and they are looking for ways to keep it and there revenue stream. It will be fun to watch
I have had good luck porting data from Outlook PST files (mostly pre-2k, but I don't think the format/API has changed enough to break things) using:
ArchivER ("Archive Outlook data as individual files, preserving the Outlook folder structure.")
Message Vault ("Archive Outlook/Exchange messages to a separate encrypted, compressed, searchable archive store. The store can also export messages to standard RFC 822 format.")
I use both because there are minor annoyances with each of them and I want to be sure I get everything.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. The "Export to Comma Delimited Text" from within Outlook looses lots of data.
Yeah, I was in one the only Current windows lab that we have at my HS and they computers there suck. Only reason it ever gets used now is because we have a CAD course in there.
"Shut up about my driving. You're still alive."
Exactly, we've tried that tactic to but they continue to argue that "In the real world" no one uses macs and that it's "hard" to migrate from an Apply System to a Windows system.
No, what really funny is that we have been running Mac OS X in our main lab now ever since the beta came out. And what's even funnier is that we currently have 5 Win2k Servers that are being Switched to Redhat Linux this summer.
The only people that want to swtich the desktops to Windows are the School Board, the Tech Admin is against it and so are all the Student Admins. We've even go so far as to start charging for our services, We've made a pretty penny since we've started doing that. But the school borad continues to argue that it's "worth' paying M$ far more then we pay Apple.
"Shut up about my driving. You're still alive."
Actually we have over 300 G3's and G4's. All computers in our HS have about a 3 year turn over rate. With windows we estimate that it would increase to 5 or 6 years with the extra costs that we would incure, in set-up, the extra administration costs, and the extra costs for software.
"Shut up about my driving. You're still alive."
We currently are using both, but the current administration won't settle for anything less then 100% windows on all the desktops. As for linux on the Apples, we do run a dual boot in our three main labs, however, our course work is currently geared towards the Apple OS. We have been working to get Linux into the mainstream education, but it's been a hard battle for the Student Administrators. Like I said in one of my other comments, we are switching out 5 Win2k Boxes over to Linux this summer.
"Shut up about my driving. You're still alive."
No matter what the population here thinks, M$ will still keep the ajority of its (l)users. ostly because people are to ignorant to see that this suscription based software isn't worth it. They will say, well everyone else is using it. why shouldn't I? My HS is currently having the same debate, the Adinistration wants to switch from Mac's to Windows, but the Sys Admin's want to stay with Apple. The School Admin's arguments are that "Well everyone else uses windows." It's a never ending battle and wether you like it or not, M$ will come out of it. Maybe with a few less customers, but this isn't going to hurt them.
"Shut up about my driving. You're still alive."
Hey Mario, the boss says your time is up, now you gotta' pay the man, or he says I gotta' break your legs. Its not personal to me, you know?
.Net deprecates MFC - World rewrites code bases - in STL
Headlines
Whistler requires dll hack to reload OS without Evil Empire approval - Lord Gates: "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it again!"
Send money to M$ every few years - or else no soup for you!
What's next, late fees?
Let me tell you about an amusing incident that occurred in the good old days: I was working at a medium sized company as an IBM DOS/SP system programmer. We used a CICS security front end from CA with a quarterly license geared to the CPUID. We were always running down to the accounts payable department to remind them to cut the check to CA or the systems would stop working. It was a quarterly ritual that started warring on the nerves. Well to make a long story short. The next time the CA tech rep called to remind us that we hadn't sent them a check. We just ignored it. As expected the next Monday morning we got the first call from the AP department that they couldn't get into the system. We went for coffee. After 30 minutes with the pagers going off constantly we walked into the AP department and explained that we had found the problem and all it would take is for them to cut a check to CA for $2500 and the problem would be solved. When they said we can't cut a check without the AP system up. With a straight face we replied that could be a problem. When the VP of the AP department had to take out his own checkbook and write that check we just thought to ourselves there's a problem we won't have again. Who says that a 3 year licenses won't work. Just multiply the above by 500 PCs and make sure that the AP's VP has a big checkbook.