Microsoft Sets Tolls for .Net Developers

matsh writes: "Today Microsoft revealed the cost of signing up as a developer to .Net. Entry level is $1,000. Standard level $10,000. Custom support will cost even more."

Comments

Re: comparison w/ developer connections

[bLanark]

This isn't for the SDK/tools, which you can get via the MSDN, if not for free online.

This is to be hosted/linked/use the core .net services such as passport. If you're developing an in-house app that doesn't touch the microsoft .net website (damn, the terminology is all wrong) then you don't need to pay your 10K USD.

This is .NET My Services, not all of .NET

[gburgyan]

This is not MS trying to inflict a toll on development -- this is MS trying to make money by selling a service. The .NET My Services is a service that interfaces with MSN Messanger to allow instant communication with your users and also authentication. Seriously people, every time MS charges for something it becomes news on slash...

The last company I was working for was going to authenticate financial transactions. Let me tell you that they were not going to do it for free. How is this any different? Or maybe the phone company charging for setting up your phone lines and billing your company monthly?

MS is charging for a service and you can choose to use it or not.

Perhaps the open source community can get together and create a distributed authentication system to compete with it.

Oh, pay attention...

[aziraphale]

This is about the cost of becoming a corporate partner for use of My Services (that's what they now call HailStorm, if you weren't paying attention).

The actual cost of developing for .NET? That'll be a big fat zero, over and above the cost of your Windows licence (although once the BSD port has happened, that'll wipe out that little overhead.

Download the .NET platform SDK, and you'll find you get the CLR, the framework libraries, the compilers, and all the command line tools you need to play with .NET.

And that'll cost you nothing. no-thing.

Yeah, VS.NET will cost you hard earned cash. So will a Windows server licence or two for hosting. But even MS isn't stupid enough to create a barrier for entry so high that nobody jumps over it at all.

Re:I thought Microsoft had learned this lesson bef

[NeoMage]

Dear o dear, this news item is really going to confuse all you people who like to speak before you have done your homework.

For starters, this is the ".NET My Services" service, it is NOT the .NET platform itself, nor is it an SDK. People are free to write .NET applications for NOTHING and all the SDK is online at msdn.microsoft.com (fuck the link, you can cut and paste).

This is no different from the city library developing a .NET service for reserving books or something and charging you to use it.

This Has Nothing To Do With The SDK

[Carnage4Life]

One of the reason that so many people are now using Windows 9x/ME/2000 is that Microsoft bascially gave away their SDK back in the days of Win 3.x, while IBM was looking to their OS/2 SDK as part of their revenue model, and charging accordingly.

The article is about pricing for accessing .NET My Services which used to be called Hailstorm not the .NET Framework SDK.

Moving to a services business will be painful

[mav[LAG]]

Microsoft's business right now is selling millions of CDs with the same code on it to as many customers as they can. There are multi-billion dollar niceties like marketing and getting existing customers to buy newer versions of the code but ultimately Microsoft's core business is to get as many of those discs out the door and installed onto customers' hardware - by whatever channel they can.

.NET and its components represent a shift away from this. A huge shift. Instead of selling code, the company wants to sell services. And when you sell services, a lot of things change about your business model which can be very painful while you're trying to make the move.

• Services are different from boxed product. Well doh. But more than one IT company has been bitten by that in the past. Charging for a service means customers generally demand that service from you. If they don't get it, they go elsewhere. And on the Web, there are plenty of places to go - most of them for free.
  
• Offering services means your infrastructure has to change - radically. Instead of a finely tuned assembly line turning out the latest products, a services-based business must offer the best infrastructure in the game to customers. Don't believe me? Then check out the unique selling points of any systems integrator you can think of. Our Global Network Brings Economies of Scale! We Will Manage Your Infrastructure! Does Microsoft have the reputation for security and reliability that goes with running an infrastructure? Not at the moment. Not even nearly.
  
• There are limits to the economies of scale in a services business that aren't there in a software business. As one of the linked articles says, Microsoft has many millions of Windows users out there, but hardly any monthly billing relationships with any of them. It has to find some way of getting to that ideal, but it will find that selling millions of CDs is a very different proposition to selling millions of relationships - because that's what it is. Sure you can wrap it all up in words like Convenience and Access Anytime Anywhere but a service contract is a relationship. It takes post-sale time and effort - something which Microsoft will have to learn because the company doesn't know a hell of a lot about it now.
  
• Services represent a trust relationship - packaged software often represents a grudge relationship The lock-in of Windows can be very easily side-stepped in a services model. Don't like the service? Don't sign up for it. Don't like the levels of service you got last month? Don't pay for them. Or go somewhere else.
  

Make no mistake - moving from a boxed product model to a services-based model is hard, whether you are a small dealer or Microsoft Corp. And often the two have clashing priorities. At the moment Microsoft spends hundreds of millions making sure its channel works hard at getting product out to the end user. If they ultimately want to move to services-based revenue and electronic upgrades, the channel could well find itself out in the cold eventually.

Re:Online banking??

[Tadeusz]

For banking website (and other sites that require more security) you'd log on with your passport and a seperate pin. From passport.com:

"Participating sites that require a more secure authentication process can use this feature to optionally:

* Require that all aspects of sign-in occur over SSL.

* Require the user to supply a second password in the form of a 4-digit personal identification number (PIN) that Passport manages. The use of the PIN, which is required in addition to the user's current password, results in a higher level of credential strength. In addition, the PIN is protected more rigorously against dictionary attacks."

Re:the .net subscription model

[sqlrob]

Of course like any thing else, MS will want to take this stuff to the subsctiption model. It will be too tempting other wise.

I know this is /., but read the article. IT IS $1000/year. Sounds like a subscription to me.

Can you people read???

[Da_Monk]

The article even says that this is for ".net my services" normal SDK models will still apply for everyday use. write all the stock quote and weather apps you want for free. jesus. learn to read an article before spouting off on just how evil and criminally insane microsoft is. anyone who has a copy of beta2 of studio .net also has a copy of the sdk, so charging a thousand for it really does not make much sense...

This story is misleading FUD

[Zico]

What Microsoft is charging for is for developers to hook into the .NET MyServices (formerly Hailstorm). That's because to use them, you'll be using Microsoft's own resources, i.e., Microsoft's bandwidth and servers. I think most people by now realize that the business model of giving this away for free is just about dead.

If you're developing apps that don't use .NET MyServices, there's no charge. You can download the .NET Framework SDK for free and write your programs in Notepad if you want. This includes standalone apps, server apps, and even web services -- just not .NET MyServices.

Unless Slashdot is just interested in shoving FUD down the throat of all its readers -- and I would hope you'd consider it an insult to your intelligence that they would do this -- they really should correct the story submission.