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Corporate America Wary of Subscription Software
medical_geek writes: "According to this
article
on cio.com,
MS's subscription service is failing in the business world. I guess
that personal users are not the only group that balks at paying a yearly
fee for software. My question is have you at your job bit the bullet
and signed up as an early adopter, or are you rolling the dice and seeing
if this experiment fails?" This article focuses only on Microsoft, but the same analysis probably explains why ASPs haven't taken off like they were supposed to, either.
We have the same problems in going out to market. We face customers that want to control their own destiny and not completely give up control of their core business.
I believe that unless the technology is a complete commodity , no company is going to be excited about signing up for something thats subscription and reley their business on it.
It'll only be when the quality of the software is up to scratch that people will start thinking about its price. In the end, the total cost of ownership of software is much larger than the licence fee: putting in fixes after deployment is terribly expensive.
"Well, put a stake in my heart and drag me into sunlight."
I hadn't seen it.
nullified my mod? how so?
if the post he linked to told u anything, its that moderating is a total joke. and im treating it as such.
ive gotten mod points 4 times in the last 6months. i usually try to get rid of em as quick as possible. does anyone _really_ care?
*cough*
i beleive that if u post anonymously, u can still mod.
not only do i beleive this, but ive done it, and the mod has not been burned.
..you should check the moderations on the post.. it started as a Score 2 post.. thne it got one Redundant and one Informative and it's at 3.. which means the Redundant desapeared when the anonymous comment fomr the moding ip was done.. :)
My company is about to do a rollout to a company of about 50 users. We are telling them to go for Win2k rather than XP, purely because of all the driver problems we are having on our test systems.
They want a fast rollout, with minimum hassles.
Windows XP cant offer that right now.
That is, if you subscribe to these upgrades, you kind of feel you will have to upgrade when something new comes along, even though you do not have to. That takes time, especially in larger offices/companies/megacorporations. Time often much better spent on actually getting some work done. Hehe. No, I don't speak of necessary patches and such - although that is a huge cost (in time) when dealing with MS products too.
So there is no reason at all to subscribe for the newest software, I would upgrade when I must (or when it pays off in better efficiency). I really understand why these big customers don't want to have their IT administrators get their timetable from another company (MS).
And I really understand those that see a bit further and refuse simply because they don't want to be (even more) locked in.
I won't buy into a software subscription service for my software for a few reasons:
1.) I can use a given software packages for years at a time...for me, SecureCRT comes to mind, though my license won't support any of the downloadable versions.
2.) The overall cost of subscription is higher. My company's official office software suite is STILL Office 97. Not that there's anything wrong with 2k or XP, but 97 gets the job done...and it's already paid for.
3.) But the big thing is what happens when a product becomes unsupported? Does the program up and quit and force an upgrade, possibly bring a screeching halt to whatever business process you working on at the time? Does the program send off a little message so the marketing drones relentlessly pound on my phone line, reminding me to renew? Are all my data files locked out?
Even though the initial cost is higher, I much prefer to just buy my software. Unfortunately, subscription is pretty much here...it's in every program that requires an Internet connection to "activate" their products. It's not confined to Microsoft Office anymore...it's just a "lifetime" subscription thing to start getting us used to the idea.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
CUstomers should get to choose their own destiny and not be forced to pay for something they dont want or need.
WHy would a business give up its core to be ran by a company who does not really appear to take security seriously.
Its a little late now to start taking it seriously. THe damge has been done and I dont think anyone will for some time consider MS.
TO be anywhere near a secure platform to work off of. (have they ever?)
I hope all companies will stay away from this.
THis is MS trying to controll the buisness world.
You will go this way or else. HAH I hope this falls flat. (Is there any kind of demand or desire for anyone to sign up for this?)
I for one do not see how this is even one bit desirable. Even from a pocket book stance.
Just remember, when you are subscribing to a service, rather than purchasing an upgrade, you have a lot less leverage as a buyer to control your costs. The CIOs, mostly managers of 'corporate cost centers', obviously recognized that.
Second, the technological rate of progress for a service provider will always be slower because its so much easier for the vendor to retain its existing revenue base than to take the risks of developing new products. For example, I predict that the more you see Microsoft switching to a subscription-based software business model, the less focus you'll see on features (needed to get new business) and the more focus you'll see on risk-averse issues (like security and availability) to insure nothing rocks the revenue boat. Oh wait, Microsoft just announced that, didn't they?
--LP
Stability: it's better than the WIN3.11 that a lot of users have now
Software Price: it's a LOT cheaper than what MS is charging for WIN ME etc. Subscription in itself is not really a problem (we have a few mainframes and IBM's software is mostly subscription based, but that usually includes upgrades and consultancy).
Total cost of ownership: It can be run on 'slower' hardware than what's needed for the newer flavors of WIN. It's also upgraded less frequently (upgrading 1500 PC's is a lot of work and therefor expensive).
PS: We also checked out Linux. The (sadly enough) only reason not to go for that was the (at that time) lack of support for MS-fileformats.
I have a photographic memory for numbers. I know almost a hundred of them.
Trust:
8. A combination of firms or corporations for the purpose of reducing competition (c.f. *) and controlling prices (c.f. **) throughout a business or an industry.
Surely someone here can help me resolve my confusion.
My company is buying NT and W2000 licenses while they last to give to our customers so that they do not get stuck. Many people for security reasons cannot have access to the internet. Furthermore, the fact that only now after years of crap Microsoft is realizing they sell Swiss cheese is a reason not to trust XP & Co.
And just how is this different from what RH is doing with their "Entitlement" plan? Smaller scale, granted, less expensive, also granted, but it still sucks to have to pay for timely updates and patches. Even more so when these are security updates! Yes yes you may still get the patches of your own accord, but to me this is just another way of RH making sure they get at least $20 dollars out of every RH install. No more downloading one copy of RH and dumping it on dozens of boxen. Now if you wanna play, you have to pay each and every time whether in the form of another copy of the distro or the godforsaken "Entitlements" program. Still better than SuSE not even providing the option of an official and fully functional iso image. On the other, good for the Linux companies that believe enough in their product that they are not going to simply give it all away. Expect to see more of this as (if) broadband connections become of the norm.
Ironically, the reason why CIOs feel empowered is that they probably have most of what they want out of their PCs; they're "good enough". Improvements post-Win2000 and older Office suites don't look that compelling. So why lock yourself into some unnecessary upgrade stream?
--LP
At the moment with the economy on a backstep Microsoft has chosen the wromg time to start the push to subscription based software. It does not need a PHD to work out that the fundamental reason for this is to increase the revenue stream from its users. (There is a nice analogy here with pushers and drug users here but i'll leave it for now)
However, there is a major bonus for the open source movement as commercial interests are now looking to reduce their exposure to MS. Consequently, Linux is gaining more credibility as an alterantive O/S within the mainstream business markets.
Frankly, I'm all for MS pushing the subscription based model as hard and as fast as possible but I don't own any MS stock and I do care about the open source movement.
yawn. get over yourself. you expect the owners of a website on topic A to give you free reign to discuss topic B?
./ reader
A longtime
People want to buy and then own a copy. Even if it's a little more expensive they want the deal done and out of the way instead of having continous costs that software-as-a-service gives them.
My biggest gripe with Microsoft software in general is the cost of the hardware upgrades, not the licences. Granted, I hate licence costs, but think about what the upgrades will do.
Idiot management user: I want to get Windows XQ (or whatever). I heard that we have the upgrade licences already.
You attempt to stall him or her, and no matter what you do, whether you appease or not, eventually the entirety of management wants it, for them and their users. So now you have to buy new hardware. And, whoops, now you're over budget.
Going with this kind of licence as a CIO means one of two things: Fired for being uncooperative with management or Fired for going way over budget.
(Is Microsoft's bloated code a conspiracy to help the hardware industry? Or is it simply a plot to continue to abuse OEM relationships?)
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
Just a thought.. but Linux Just Makes Sense more and more now-a-days, even if in some cases, it is less capable than the Microsoft alternative.
My company is in no rush to adopt XP. At the current time we're sticking with NT4 (some 2000). The reason is quite simple (and two fold) - the overall cost over the 'product lifespan' is significantly more. If you buy a copy of NT, then you own a copy of NT (or site license). It will remain 'valid' for several years (5 or so) and is a one off cost. Even better is the fact that when we buy a new PC this is included as the Redmond tax and thus is an 'invisible' cost to the business.
(No I don't like this practice, but the company as a whole does)
The other reason is the difference between capital and ongoing running costs. If you are renewing an XP license each year, your _service_ cost increases per desktop. As an IT department, we don't care, but our users definitely do.
The 'capital expenditure' of buying a new workstation and a copy of an OS goes into a different 'budget bucket'. It makes it easier to explain as 'we need to buy a PC and a copy of windows' rather than 'We need to buy a PC, and then we need to pay for a license for it each year'.
I'm really hoping this master plan of microsoft is going to fail. IT is the same situation as ASP - software developers want to have a steady income, but end users and companies see it as a 'I pay x bucks for your product'.
As long as any software distributer is selling 'forever' licenses, few are going to opt in to an ongoing fee service (IMHO).
We expect people who run a very popular weblog/discussion site who constantly preach openness and free speech and who also say that the site is self-moderated to actually live up to their word instead of moderating an entire thread of well over 100 posts down indiscrimantly instead of letting the users take care of it themselves.
I can never see the everyday consumer takeing up .NET or ever useing their applications. That is, MS's go at it.
However, I only see the MS.NET being viable to businesses, possible only start up businesses who can only aford to pay little money per month or a year rather then an entire licence at once.
This may also push more people to use Open Source software because
1) runing applications like this has to have some sort of performance hit.
2) everyone is a little sceptical of useing their credit card over the net.
3) By the time its released, Java should be good enough to compete or maybe aswell anyother Java alternative such as Elate/intent from Tao.
---------------
Rodney McDonell
Big companies are reminding me more and more of great, stupid, predatory animals. They fish the seas dry, annihilate competition, and chew down more of their prey each time. There's no intelligence, no forethought, it's all one-way traffic, with consumers as food.
When a predator gains an overwhelming advantage in a natural system, they typically exhaust their entire food supply, which in turn triggers their own extinction. I suppose this is what comes from skipping those elective natural science classes to focus on your MBA.
Microsofts licensing charges are proportionally steeper than the software systems we have.
Also licensing, typically, gives you technical support and escalation facilities.
Will we be able to ring them when things break?
eBay is one of the most successful ASPs on the Internet. Sellers seem to have no problem paying a per-auction fee to eBay for hosting the auction application. You can imagine an alternative where everone paid $10 for an eBay application that sat on their Windows desktop and did a P2P search of current auctions by communicting Gnutella-style with the other eBay applications. It would suck. The ASP version kicks its ass any day of the week.
Similarlly, I used to work for a company with an ASP remote access application. To circumvent firewalls that only allow outbound connections, the company routes all connections through their servers; there's no other way to do it if you want to support connections where both endpoints are firewalled. Hence, ASP. It's easy for me to justify paying a monthly fee to use this service because the application demands it. I have to use their servers. (The company includes free support and free upgrades with the subscription fee, too, which makes it rather more attractive than Microsoft's licensing scheme.)
As for ASP MS Office... At this point, my reaction is, "What's the point?" In the absence of ubiquitous thin-client computing, I can't see at all why I'd want to pay for a subscription. There's no value in an ASP model for lots of applications, include most of Microsoft's (with obvious exceptions like Hotmail).
ASPs didn't fail. They just succeeded where it was logical for them to succeed.
Shut the fuck up and get over yourself! Its just a stupid weblog site.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
You can't grow your market. If you can't grow your market, then how do you increase your revenues? The only way is to change your pricing structure. Since you are a monopoly everyone has to cough up (or at least that's what MS thought).
Unfortunately for MS it seems to be inducing people to look for alternative ways of reducing the money they pay. This is the time to do some evangalisation folks!
I was originally very sceptical of subscribing to software as a service. The tools I use every day (Dev Studio etc), I would like to buy on CD, install on my box, and keep.
I am starting to move towards the idea now. A couple of weeks ago I wanted to play around with some images in Photoshop. I had to find the CD, install it, use it for an hour or so, then uninstall it. It's not worth paying several hundreds dollars to do this, so most people won't bother. There are quite a few apps that I will want to use a couple of times a year, or once a month.
With a subscription based system my company could have an account with say, Adobe. When I need to use Photoshop, I go to the website, and use it as a service, and the company gets a bill at the end of the month. It's simple.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
Good department. Certainly appropriate.
We're talking about a company here that wants to milk as much money out of its' customers, with the least effort required.
They're certainly working well toward that goal -- look where we are now!
- We have a 'server' OS that differs from the 'Ooo, SHINY!' home version by virtue of just a few registry settings!
- Microsoft will accept NO liability for its' software, neither for fitness for purpose, the accidental destruction of your company, or the surreptitious mailing of your anti-government rants to the FBI.
- Two words: Product Activation. Once upon a time, the MS Office license actually allowed you to install it on your home & work machines. Gee, Microsoft sure is a nice company! They're cute and cuddly, too! Now that everyone's used to it, all of a sudden we have to pay for every copy -- you can't tell me that wasn't a patiently engineered plan.
If Microsoft wants to make subscriptions attractive, offer something in return -- we already get all the benefits of WindowsUpdate, are they going to take that away? What is needed is a guarantee of fitness for use, stability, and timely repair of problems. And by timely, I mean 'timely from the customer's definition', not Microsoft's!(Why does a server need Media Player, DirectX, Active Desktop, and all the other home-version 'shell-upgrade' tweaks, anyway?!?)
If I go to Ford and buy a dump truck, I am guaranteed that it will haul N tons of material, or N cubic meters, whichever is less. If I bought a 10-ton truck, and the wheels fall off when I put a 5-ton payload in it, I can sue.
Apply this comparison to Microsoft: I purchase Windows 2000 Server, Exchange Server, and the recommended hardware to run it on, and when it fails at half the advertised max load, Microsoft will gladly bill me for a support incident to tell me I need better hardware! ...And there's nothing I can do about it.
I know this comparison isn't perfect, but it certainly makes the point. I know a lot of companies are sick and tired of buying something advertised as suiting a particular purpose, only to find it lacking.
If the subscription allows me to hold MS accountable, I'm interested. Otherwise, forget it.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
We have just removed a program that has been in service for some 30 years on our mainframes. It has been modified, upgraded and bug fixed in that time, but it has been in constantly in use over 3 decades.
We want a similarly stable service on our other systems, including desktops. Admittedly we don't necessarily want the same software lifetime. But given that we have some 50,000 or so desktops we don't want to be patching or upgrading the software on them very often. It takes a lot of effort to plan and install a new piece of software across all our desktops.
Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
You can't copy (worst word: piracy) these programs. You know how lots of people have expensive programs for free on their home, so they can test it, study, learn, improve. A subscription model won't let you do this (without a heavily software modification by crackers).
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
The guy claims, he's gonna be charged an extra $8 million for upgrading everyone to the new office?
Just think what sort of an OpenOffice you could buy for that money. That would pay 30 programmers for 2 years, and once that money was spent, you could have as many copies as you like.
At my place of business, we develop VB applications (no flames please) that we use internally to control inventory, and to track units that we produce, as well as write test software to well, test our product before it ships. Besides running windows 98/NT/2000, we've decided to start converting our software over to Linux, writing in pure C, and using MySQL for databases. OK, I know this seems OT so far, but my point here is that we are doing all of this to avoid using XP and any other upcoming versions of MS windows. We have decided that we will do our best to make sure that 2000 is the last version of windows that we will ever buy, at least in our department. We've already been using Linux on servers within our department for about a year, using apache to run a simple intranet server, and have samba up doing file and print services. Since some of the brass have found out about our 'secret' of having high availability linux servers, they were intrigued and like the direction we've taken thus far. Hopefully we can avoid XP all together, and write software that can potentially be useful forever, by writing it for an OSS platform.
------
Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
...I'm using a company machine with WinNT 4.0 SP6a. With a "Windows(R) 2000 Professional 1-2 CPU" sticker on the side. We downgraded it, and for a very good reason.
It does everything that I need to do my job. It does nothing that I don't need. The issues are known. It doesn't require any more patching because it ain't broke, or it's broke in known and acceptable ways. It doesn't require our IT guys to have to ask what version of what OS I'm running, nor to hunt out the right ghost image for that combination of hardware and OS. It can be ghost installed or copied, which is vital for replicating software builds.
Windows 2000 would be a barely acceptable substitute. There are far too many unknowns with WinXP, plus it has that habit of knowing better than you what drivers you really want to use (I need to test beta drivers, for god's sake, give me an "I know what I'm doing" button!).
Windows.NET would be absolutely, utterly unworkable in a business environment, because neither I, nor our IT guys would know what exactly was on the machine, nor would it be possible to replicate that at a later date to reproduce a build exactly.
We cannot and will not upgrade to .NET. Ever. As application support for NT dies away at the same time as Linux support grows, it's looking like a better (corporate!) proposition every day, and not just in the server room.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
An ISP I used to work for tried to sell MSExchange WEB ASP services and it was a huge flop. Of course it didn't help that our sales force SUCKED. Guess that's why they don't exist anymore.
what are you using, a beta version or something? There's a "Continue Anyway" button if you still want to install those beta drivers.
If people thought like you we'd still be stuck with DOS, Mac OS 8 and RedHat 5
I've found that the easiest way to convince the big whigs that ASPs are not a good idea is to tell them that if they make that choice I will not be the one in control of the backup tapes.
... everybody uses pirated software.
I am not going to debate with anyone whether this is a major reason why DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.) failed... but I believe it was part of it. I worked for the US Gov't in the late 80's and we had a lot of VAXes running VMS. EVERY STINKING YEAR we had to pay money to upgrade our licenses.
This idea came and went, and I for one am personally very happy that Micro$oft has chosen such a moronic policy that has, in part, caused other companies to fail. Here's to your self-inflicted demise, Bill!!! "Have at it, and good luck!"
One of the biggest factors keeping companies from adopting the "software as a service" model has been, as you suggest, fear of outsourcing critical business functions to shaky ASP Internet startups. However, in the current economic environment, most "bad" ASPs have already gone away, or are hanging on by their fingertips -- no longer are you seeing people dumping Windows apps over the Internet using Terminal Server and crap like that. It is just not cost-effective.
Still, outsourced software provides real value in many cases, and companies want it dearly. For example, if you have any idea how expensive it is to pay IT staff simply to support MS Exchange for a medium to large-size company, the costs are huge. Several companies are currently making a living hosting Exchange, Oracle Financials, and other "hostable" commercial software packages because over time it is actually cheaper to pay someone else a flat monthly fee to manage it than to hire your own staff, especially if you are a large organization. Intermedia is one ISP I've seen that hosts Exchange, for example.
Many solid ASPs are also targeting more distributed types of organizations, one of which is Professional Services. Companies such as Portera provide collaboration tools such as online time sheets and expense sheets, as well as document sharing and versioning, all over the Internet through a browser.
For PS organizations or Contract Agencies distributed around the globe, a hosted application avoids the staggering infrastructure costs that go along with having a global company. Take into account maintaining your VPN gateways, so you can get to varied internal applications, which must also be maintained, plus licensing and support costs, plus hardware/network and you are talking big money. With a hosted app, you pay your flat fee, after which all you need is an internet connection and you're in.
As for big-money (but new) service-arena players like Microsoft, it seems obvious they are trying to leverage customers into an even tighter spot with this new licensing scheme, without providing real added value. This subscription thing doesn't seem to work very well with shipped products, since you are forcing people to "throw away" something tangible that they feel works fine, and upgrading desktop machines costs dollars not only in licensing but also in the whole loss of inertia in the company with the upgrade (and IT staff). However, as M$ moves more toward providing .NET services we will see them become more successful in selling subscriptions for web services and the like. That is, as long as they don't shoot themselves in the foot with Passport. ;)
--Micko
everybody lies with performance figures. you should be fired for not evaluating your purchases properly.
update comments set karma=-1, reason='offtopic' where sid=26315
Even Eric S. Raymond agrees with MS on this one :
"It is also worth noting that the manufacturing delusion encourages price structures that are pathologically out of line with the actual breakdown of development costs. If (as is generally accepted) over 75% of a typical software project's life-cycle costs will be in maintenance and debugging and extensions, then the common price policy of charging a high fixed purchase price and relatively low or zero support fees is bound to lead to results that serve all parties poorly.
Consumers lose because, even though software is a service industry, the incentives in the factory model all cut against a vendor's offering competent service. If the vendor's money comes from selling bits, most effort will go to making bits and shoving them out the door; the help desk, not a profit center, will become a dumping ground for the least effective and get only enough resources to avoid actively alienating a critical number of customers." - Eric S. Raymond
This is taken from The Magic Cauldron
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeah, but will there be future upgrades?
It seems to me that right now, MS has to "roll" all its products every 2-3 years for income. So they stop shipping Win98 or whatever, break the file formats for O97 that work just fine in order to get folks to shell out for the next upgrade.
With a subscription model, they get your money without the incentive to upgrade. So we may actually see upgrade costs go down, albeit with a steady stream of bugfixes and patches that blur the product identity and make interfacing with anything non-standard (SAMBA, whatever) a real bear to support.
I to use NT4 on some servers, just because they host websites and do that for a long time now and if it aint broke, don't fix it. However, Win2k brings new stuff to the plate, which you haven't touched according to your story. F.e. fully automated software installation/controll via AD using easy scripts. Windows.NET server will make this even easier. What you say about it wouldn't be workable is so far off the truth it hurts. Why? Because it has f.e. the checkpoint tech that's also in XP: you can roll back to any state you want: with the registry, with the drivers etc.
At ABN-AMRO, one of the worlds largest banks, they totally run on win2k and use an inhouse developed softwarecontrol/distribution system, based on AD and VBScript. Everything can be and is controlled from a central point in the WAN. Not workable? ha!. Perhaps you should kick your IT-guys in the butt so they finally get their head out of their asses and read the course material they received at the courses they attended to.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
"Microsoft Corp. today announced record revenue of $7.74 billion for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2001, an 18 percent increase over the $6.55 billion reported in the prior year"
I guess that for some weird reason there income keeps on increasing. After all, nobody buys MS products and there new licensing scheme is a complete failure. They must be practicing the art of black magic or something.
i worked briefly for an ASP and i can say this:
one of the biggest problems with software or service subscriptions is skepticism. if you're talking something established like cable there's no question in most peoples' minds. when it comes to the internet too many of the people (individuals, small companies) who would actually be paying for things like this are too under-educated to trust the internet as a medium for doing serious business.
my point is further illustrated by the dotcom crash.
even in our high tech age, we have a ways to go before companies can try to charge for goods an services this way.
I work for an ASP in the financial sector located outside of Philadelphia. I'd like to say for the record that not only are we surviving the dot-com crash, but we are doing quite well.
Even through the September 11th disaster and financial woes that followed, our firm thrived and actually had sales INCREASE during that time.
The trick to us being a successful ASP is that we have an extremely driven sales department, and a very adaptable product that can be modified to suit any user's needs. We fill a niche with industry knowledge and expertise that is quite valuable to our customers.
Please don't lump companies like mine in with Dr. Koop dot COM!
Many successful software companies charge support fees in addition to a flat fee for the software itself. Sometimes the support contract is mandatory to obtaining the software. This really amounts to the same thing as M$'s deal, but the way Microsoft does it has more of an unsavory feel, doesn't it?
Why is that? Conceptually, we know that any given piece of software is only going to last a few years (without an upgrade) before it becomes irrelevant. Wouldn't it be easier to just pay an annual fee and always get the latest and greatest without having to worry about it?
But, I guess it is the idea of personal choice, and the fact that it's cheaper only if you were going to get every single upgrade with no break in between.
Perhaps they should just return to sold software and support contracts.
Sure Xp is secure, what other os has problems with PnP, Software updates? The most secure OS available today is OpenBSD, the most secure OS is KAOS. One thread to censor them all!
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
I'm an IT Manager, and also opted not to take the Software Insurance offer. For one it meant that we'd have upgrade (or at least buy the licenses) all our MS products to latest version. All the NT + Exchange + SQL CALs, and then Windows + Office + Project... It adds up quickly.
... :-) But if you don't take software assurance then you can't just upgrade down the line. You have to pay the full purchase price. Which is all fine and dandy, except that they didn't write the product from scratch, they built it on top of older versions. And you already paid them for the intellectual property in the previous versions, so why do it again? Upgrade in the older, normal sense is much more fair, since you only pay them for the added value... when you need it.
But my main point that I wanted to make is that it's just plain unfair. Microsoft want you to pay them even when you *don't* want the latest and greatest. (And 95% can life without it... If some people think StarOffice 5.2 is good enough
Pardon the rant.
Because microsoft measures value based on increasing revenues each year, maximizing share holder value means shorten the product cycle from 2-4 years to 1 year. From a share holder perspective, it's great. A rapid product cycle is a good thing for share holders because it means you're getting more repeat business more frequently.
From a user perspective, a certain level of product stability is necessary to create a sense of value and reliability. If the product cycles at a faster rate the customer is comfortable with, the company begins to loose business. Think of a can opener. What if every can opener was only good for 10 uses and it would break. No one would buy can goods or can openers. Food manufacturers would use some other container, like a jar instead of cans. It doesn't matter if the can opener is only 2.00. No one wants to buy a new can opener every week.
Microsoft is not immuned to the same market principles. Making a product too good or really poor isn't good for the company, consumers or the economy. Back in the 80's Honda found a good way to make bearings in such a way that they would last 30-50 years. Well guess what. Honda stopped using them in cars because they were too good. Using those bearings in cars made them way too reliable and was hurting replacement parts sales. There has to be some middle ground where corporate and consumer needs are in balance.
Microsoft may or may not realize it before it is too late.
Ah, but they're not planning to solve this by changing the software. They're planning to solve this by changing the dump trucks. read about it ;-)
Oh, that's rich. I know, let's lie to our customers then tell them that their tech staff is incompetent! When a company says something, they should do it.
:)
Let's apply this elsewhere. If a company says you will, at a minimum, receive a 20% raise after 1 year of employment, and then gives you a 5% raise and no chance to negoiate, you'd be mad, no?
So how is when Microsoft says it's OS will do 20% of the job any other OS should on the same hardware, and then does 5% of that 20%, people aren't allowed to get mad?
Autodesk has been trying to do this this with AutoCAD for the past couple of years. The reason that it has met resistance there is the fact that every other realse has been a failure (Release 11, 13, 2000). I am worried that they will upgrade a good release with a bad one.
They say that they will have a way of backing out of the subscription upgrage. I just want to make my drawings they want a steady stream of money. Maybe I could pay them to leave AutoCAD alone.
i really dont understand how redhat forces people to pay for stuff. i download updates nightly from them to our file server. then i use apt4rpm to update the programs i choose on the workstations using a nightly script.
perhaps i'm missing something here.
-- john
My wife works for a large investment house. And they have not bought into this scheme. They are now thinking about deploying LINUX. This is done for two reasons:
1) Put Microsoft in its place
2) Test LINUX and see if it actually is usable.
I think now is a good time to show how good LINUX is. Corporations have the ear of the other software vendors.
Interesting that Microsoft always said they would never make the mistake that other corporations did when they got large. True they did not, but they are making their own mistake. It is not arrogance, but "Microsoft rightness". I bet this will make interesting business case in the future.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
We're jumping head-first into Microsoft products here, at a non-profit operation. Office XP alone will cost us several tens of thousands of dollars (US) per year. All this while we're being told there's no money. All this despite the fact that I had prepared an alternate path that relied on open source and free (as in beer) software which met all of our needs. Why? Because the executive committee, or at least the only one on it with a backbone, decided that anything that is downloaded is bad. Never mind the fact that I countered that by saying that all of the software required could be acquired without download. Unfortunately, there's still a mindset among the people who write the cheques that Microsoft is the best option. So they'll shell out $50,000 per for Office, while their underpaid staff continue to leave to work for better managed companies.
This is the second time since I started working here that management hasn't followed my recommendations. The first time was a disaster. Hmmm, let's peer into my crystal ball...
What is the "advertised max load" anyways?
Is that the set of numbers you came up with in your pilot test lab <sarcasm>that you surely ran the software through before deploying into production</sarcasm>?
Nobody guarantees specific performance numbers on unknown hardware in an unknown environment!
We have a 'server' OS that differs from the 'Ooo, SHINY!' home version by virtue of just a few registry settings! Why does a server need Media Player, DirectX, Active Desktop, and all the other home-version 'shell-upgrade' tweaks, anyway?!?)
:)
Ask Apple. They were first with this kind of "features" after all. (As a bonus, you get the 'Ooo SHINY!' hardware to run it on aswell, complete with DVD player, huge gfx card and all (I kid you not).
All Apple users love to point out that they were first with everything anyway, well here you do have one you can take credit for without anyone protesting.
"...everybody lies with performance figures."
"...lies..."
Inappropriate, uncalled for, and absolutely unacceptable. In the absence of accountability, I at least demand accuracy.
The example I used is based on an experience I had with Exchange Server crashing uncontrollably. It was running on one of the sweetest Compaq servers I have seen to date, with things like UltraSCSI RAID 5 and over a gigabyte of memory (back when that meant something.) I was working for a VAR, and we had the support contract for this machine. Microsoft Knowledgebase: useless. Phone call to MS: no help, $90 down the drain. The one guy in our company who'd dealt with it before on the phone: priceless.
Before you berate me for being clueless, get this -- the thing was crashing while unplugged from the network! That's right, zero load, no users. It was weird... but it eventually got fixed.
You're probably right; whoever made that purchase decision ought to be flogged.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
You can run the software forever- there's no new fees. You just can't call MS and expect support, or any new patches.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Or VMS, or bespoke, which is what most of the monitoring and control systems in the nuclear industry runs on. But this was becoming too expensive, and when last I was working in the industry, NT 3.51 had been settled on as their new OS of choice. I thought (and said) at the time that it was insane, but the decision had been made.
The point is that developers supplying this industry (and any other safety critical industry, think air traffic control or hospitals) absolutely have to be able to replicate older systems when they do any fixes or replacements. It's a contractual requirement, and it should be obvious why it makes sense.
As Microsoft moves towards software as a service, that's becoming harder and harder to do, and I shudder to think of the consequences of an applications contractor replacing an NT 3.51 system with an NT 4, Win2k, XP or (god help us) .NET system simply because it's too much trouble for them to get their hands an NT 3.51 install, or to source new hardware that NT 3.51 has drivers for. Think 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the line. How many 1982 OS's will run on modern commodity hardware?
Ironically, the reason for the move from VMS and proprietary OS's to MS was that the industry was instructed to cut the ties to proprietary solutions for budget reasons (sourcing old hardware to replace broken VMS consoles cost a fortune). So now they're tied to MS, who have a clearly stated obsolescence policy. It's practically guaranteed that 2002 vintage WinXP won't be installable on 2022 hardware. NT is already unsupported, and 2K will be when .NET rolls out. So we're back to the same problems of replicating builds and sourcing old hardware to match the OS.
Was that clear enough? Corporate America is not just cube farms writing documents and browsing Dilbert, it's the very infrastructure of the country. Sections of that infrastructure cannot (or should not!) allow themselves to be railroaded into using systems with built in obselescence, which is why software-as-a-service is going to have a very, very hard sell in those sectors.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
One possible advantage to software vendors moving toward subscription based pricing models is that it could free up your OS mobility.
... so even though OS X looks pretty spiffy - changing from w2k is pretty unlikely as I not only need to look at the cost of the new hardware, but also the cost of migrating software.
I've got over $3000 tied up in various pieces of software from Adobe, Macromedia, and Strata
-
On the other hand, it could also bite the software vendors in the butt, because they might find out that the folks who spent $500 on a particular piece of software just because they needed it once will never need it again.
- vin
Actually, Office XP bought at retail (not OEM) allows you to install it on two different computers (laptop/desktop or home/work PCs). OEM is still tied to the hardware though.
maybe you only had creationism as science, but sharks are one of the Evolutionary Optimal Predators.
They haven't changed much in 300 million years, they eliminate the weak from the oceans, cut down overpopulation of fish and keep the ocean safe for smart animals.
The only animal species which is not in equilibrum with the environment is man.
However, man has the capacity to leave the world by war or by spacecraft.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
That's what all companies do. They can't afford to support the extremely old products especially based on the old (software is not a service) idea.
The email received by FBI is due to NSA using echelon to listen for dissent.
This is done in the UK, Canada, Australia & NZ by their spys too.
MS is pressing for a bill that makes software companies responsible so they can screw open source software companies out of the market.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
If you rent software, it's on the books as an expense.
If you "buy" software, it's on the books as a Capital Expenditure, i.e. an asset.
Soooo, given a choice which one will the bean counters choose?
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
...is whether it can successfully force its customers to buy something they don't want.
For a long time now, large companies and IT departments have ALWAYS dragged their feet on new Microsoft OS versions, because they have NEVER liked the cost/benefit equation. But they have always ended up by giving in, because Microsoft has enough power to insure that going along with them is the lesser of two evils... plus they have to deal with new PC hardware that comes preloaded with more or less whatever Microsoft wants.
It's not news that corporate IT departments don't like what Microsoft is pushing. It's only news if they can successfully resist it.
My guess is that they probably can't, because Microsoft _is_ a monopoly and the Federal Government is not acting forcefully enough to remedy this. A storekeeper might rationally decide that his own best interests lie in paying protection racketeers; IT departments may decide that their own best interests lie in paying Microsoft software rentals, just as, years ago, it was in their own best interests to shrug their shoulders and go along with IBM's manipulation, tiered pricing, etc.
Someone should tell the antivirus companies that subscription doesn't work.
It completely pisses me off that now I have to essentially "repurchase" my anti-virus software every year or two in order to keep getting auto updates. (Yes, I can manually update the AV data files, but that's a pain in the ass in a multi-user environment of any reasonable size.)
Remember when you bought your AV software once and got updates for ever?
load "windows7"
At Worldcom, from what I hear from a buddy, they are tearing out their exchange infrastructure by the roots in order to go LDAP, using iPlanet, JSP and Java instead of .NET. WHy? Costs of .NET are going to be prohibitive when you tally up the licensing world-wide, and then add in the huge developer and admin overhead.
Also, they want to go SIP on everything (RFC2543), and MS, as usual, says they do SIP, but they do their own (incompatable) tweaked version that drives you toward using one of their servers.
The "once-off" vs "subscription based" software model is not too different from the "flat monthly rate" vs "traffic volume related" pricing scheme for internet connections.
Many not-too-heavy internet users may actually be better off if they choose traffic volume related scheme. However, the uncertainty (what if my bf/gf/partner/children/dog/etc downloaded 30GB of mp3...) usually drive them to the not that suitable flat rate scheme. Software subscription is just similar.
ESR's analysis makes good economic sense and this , in general, is good for the non open-source software community. But, good ideas does not necessary lead to success, esp if we ignores the human factor.
A much more attractive pricing scheme would be an automatic transfer of catagory if the accumlated subscription fee is larger than a certain amount.
This hybrid scheme would be a great help for a lot of specialised software vendor (eg Adobe). Take Adobe Distiller as an example, many PHB are hesitant to authorise the purchase order for this type of software as they do not know whether it is really useful for their office. On the other hand, a job-by-job subscription scheme is also bad as the IT budget if too many staff are interested in that software. I believe the proposed hybrid pricing scheme would be a good balance.
What clueless MCSE did your assessment? (Yeah, I know that's redundant...)
Ever hear of Star/Open Office?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Not to be off topic - but this is illegal. Sorry, really, but an OEM version of the software that comes with the machine must (MUST) keep that version of the OS that it came with, unless you purchased another "shrink wrap" copy of 2000/NT4. The only version of software you can downgrade is "shrink wrap". Might want to check your licenses....
OK - that being said. We are not doing the subscriptions based stuff either. Nor are we buying the OS with the box anymore (much to Dell's frustration). Why pay for something that your NOT going to upgrade. I pay extra to downgrade a box. I seen a lot of posts that state NT4 is running fine for that web site (its much easier to secure - that's why people are still using it) or that legacy database app, custom app, etc...
M$ is upgrading software about every 2.5+ years now. If you get a subscription, you have to renew it in 2 years - gee just under when the next version is coming out. I think that a company would subscribe to a package for no other reason than - loyalty. If you have a subscription - you will basically be paying twice for every new version of everything that you have. NO thanks! M$ has to learn that it is NOT IBM, never have been and never will be - period.
One more rant b4 I go. The thing that pisses me off the most is the fact that M$ says - 20 gazillion copies of Windows 2000 sold so far this year. How many people (like me) buy shrink wrap 2K and load NT 4 on the machines. A LOT I would bet!!
We are an M$ shop here - but just to raise my karma a bit - I have 2 rogue BSD boxes in the wild here. Oh and the OS on both of them was FREE! Didn't even need a license key - honest... :)
Duke
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.
It's still in there? Amazing. I don't have a copy of OfficeXP, so I can't look.
For some reason I thought they'd phased that out a few years back. (About the time WordPerfect was twitching on the floor.)
Never said my memory was perfect.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
"Total=214"
What a total fuckin' waste.
I'm starting to think that mod points should only be positive. Raise the roof, leave the floor alone.
Because it's obvious that the moderators are much more interested in finding some no-good-shits[*] to dump on that elevating an underrated post.
[*]And if you don't understand the reference, and how it is relevant, don't even bother to mod this post.
Listen up sunshine, what part of (score: 0) don't you understand?
By your logic, every anti-MS post should be modded down as "Redundant"
translation- "Microsoft Licensing 6.0 wants to cum on your face"
Asps are poisionous snakes. Who wants to deal with that?
If you give your customer excellent service, a good product, and timely updates, subscription services work and work well. My parent company sells a product for Windows that costs around $20,000. They purchased my bosses company to get his clients (around 300) and sell them upgrades. They were on a subscription model and there are still 60+ using his old DOS software!!!! from 1994.
So tell me it wont work for businesses.
On the other hand this will not work for Microsoft because they have horrible support, a POS product, untimely updates, and a bad public perception for being a company you can trust. So when someone says subscriptions dont work they need to pull their head out. Subscriptions work as long as you trust the company you are subscribing to to deliver. This goes for all types of businesses. For example, Sports Illustrated has no problems with people saying they only want to pay once. If they do then they go to Barnes & Noble/Borders/Waldenbooks and pick up a 1 time deal. They do not expect anything beyond that (which is significantly different from software consumers who buy 1 time and expect the world from their vendor). If the reader wants to get more he (amazingly) subscribes.
This isn't fucking rocket science, noone trusts the assholes in Redmond to hold up their end of the bargin. That is why subscriptions won't work (for MS)
I find it *very* hard to believe that there is a company out there, that has 1500 users, that is still running Windows 3.11. That software hasn't been supported or available since 1997.
Also, Microsoft is not selling new versions of NT. Existing users can still purchase NT licenses but, new customers can only but Windows 2000. Furthermore, what corporation would invest in new software who's end of life has already been anounced?
I think this is a troll.
Very dangerous, you go first.
I work for a small company(1800 desktops, 100 servers) and we're holding off for awhile. We've done our upgrades. We don't need anymore right now.
Wow. This article pretty much nailed the "Microsoft problem" for me, and not just with licensing, but the same attitude prevails in the security, marketing and management parts of the company. (Personally, I think this is aaaaaall Monkeyboy - things just haven't been the same since Bill went off into the hinterlands as a "Consultant" and left the day-to-day in Ballmer's hands....) Anyway, it's good to hear I'm not alone in my thinking. I also find it amazing that what MS's competitors and the DOJ couldn't do, MS is doing (to) themselves -- they're making MS customers consider spending their money and time elsewhere.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Very interesting link in the article : Let's stop wasting $78 billions a year
:
From the article
"We didn't pay Oracle. We owed maintenance of $300,000 to $400,000, and we just didn't pay it. We said, 'We're holding on to the money until you get this thing up and running.'"
--BILL CROWELL, CIO, MEREDITH CORP.
"If CIOs could say, 'You'll get 10 percent now and 10 percent after each quarter if the software works, it would give vendors a financial incentive to make sure the product works."
--GREG SEYK, CIO, VISIONQUEST
"Those folks involved in the open-source movement are very knowledgeable at what they do, and they're producing really great code."
--RAYMOND DURY, CO-CIO OF AMERITRADE
Are these guys my personal heros or what?
Pass this link around and make sure that your CIO (and CTO, and CEO...) gets it. You never know, he might want to be part of that club these guys are forming : The Cluefull CIOs Club.
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end
Where I work we're still using NT4 and Word 97. This is a medium sized company with 1000 employees. I think that until the current economic climate changes, not many businesses are going to touch XP, or even Win2K for that matter.
If you were a corporate exec: which would you rather do?
(A): Give up control of mission critical services to a third party thats only interest is to increase the bottom line.
or
(B): Keep it in-house, so you can keep your eyes on it.
Most corporations realize that it isn't wise to let important company services be controled by an outsider.
The way I see things, Microsoft's "Software as a subscription" is doomed to failure because they're in the totally wrong area for this to work. I'm sorry, but I see no reason why I should have to continually renew my license to use Word. All the functionality I need was written into it by the early 90's. And even then, I was just as likely to use WordStar or WordPerfect, depending on whether I was at school (Word) or home (WS or WP). Same goes for practically every other app MS sells. The industries where subscriptions *could* work are ones that involve frequent updates, like anti-virus definitions (Buy the engine for $20 or so, and a yearly $5 definition subscription), or tax preparation. Why should I buy a new copy of TurboTax every year for $40, when there are so few changes to the tax laws. Again, sell me the engine for $20, and I'll subscribe to the federal and state(s) forms as I need them.
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
We have to have MCPs and MCSEs
... 8)
Who have full and unlimited access to MS phone support
Thus negating the need for yearly fees.
We just have to pay those MC guys.
Maybe I'll recalculate
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
...between this subscription model and one where you have to renew your license annually else the software stop working? Well, IMHO, beyond being potentially more ``fine-grained'', not much. We were using a software package that required that we receive new license keys from the vendor each year. The package was expensive and any delays on the vendor's side in processing your paid invoice and getting the keys out to the customer were not considered to be their problem. I've worked at companies that were held hostage by vendors like this. In one case we were able to tell them ``No thanks'' when it came time to renew since their software wasn't Y2K compliant and the version that was would have required a whole lot of other software to be upgraded. And there were a whole lot of reasons why this wasn't possible. (As it turned out, this vendor's software could be replaced with a Perl script that provided the 99% of the functionality that people actually used.)
Businesses are going to look damned hard at any model that potentially halts their ability to function because of billing problems, communications delays, etc. It's one thing to have to subscribe to a support service so that configuration issues, bug fixes, etc. can be solved. But having to open up the check book just to be able to continue writing documents, doing spreadsheets, etc. just isn't going to be popular. And especially if it requires that proprietary business data actually have to reside on someone else's computers.
Just my US$0.02...
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
:)
hawk
I work for a fortune 500, whom will remain unnammed.[But I will say we make power tools, lots, and everyone has heard of us.]
.. because this was the first time they heard we were going to be PAYING a subscription fee annualy!]
.. they actually started to consider an open source solution. [the 2 camps are digging trenches now.]
.. "do you want to pay 200k or 700k" and totally ignoring the new policy where you have to pay an annual fee on NT which was written in 1993.
.. and seemed desperate to me .. now i know why .. we would have been a fairly well branded chip to show people that this was how big business does things .
We are very in bed with MS software wise, much to my chagrin.
A few months ago MicroSoft was in pitching to us that we should upgrade from NT4 to WIN2k for our network & desktop machines.
The sales guy's pitch was that if we did it *NOW* it would only cost us $200k more a year on our annual subscription fees, if we did it now - or $700k more a year if we waitied till our licence expired. [At which point 1/2 the people in the room blinked
Keeping in mind how in LOVE with MS our support team is
The scarey part is that MS was using a simple drop close
The guy was REALLY pushy
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
I used to work for a small company with a very unprofessional IT Dept. We were scoping out email management/CRM software, and had the choice between licensing or going with an ASP. Both had similar features and price structures. We ultimately went with the ASP because we didn't trust that our own IT Dept could effectively install and manage the application locally.
So in my opinion there's a place for the ASP model, at least for small or medium sized companies that aren't particularly effective in managing their own software.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
And another leasing issue. The Commonwealth College of Penn State has switched from "buy new faculty a desktop, and let the future take care of itself" to "lease laptops for three years." I can't help but believe that the availablity of funds somewhere for "oooh, go with laptops!" was better than desktops, but I'm getting the impression from some places that the "go away in 3 years" is actually desired by our campus (not IT) administrators--we've had people with several year old computers; this *forces* the system to keep us up to date. (we have about 3 apple II's still in use, but that's another issue--it's special software that works just fine).
hawk
What is this? Babbling nonsense day on slashdot?
"Not to be off topic - but this is illegal. "
You can downgrade licenses purchased under a volume license agreement, but yep not OEM licenses.
"I seen a lot of posts that state NT4 is running fine for that web site (its much easier to secure - that's why people are still using it) "
Well that's certainly not true. Windows 2000 is much better as a web server and far easier to secure.
Furthermore, NT 4.0 goes on the unsupported list this year.
A few months ago, inspired in part by Slashdot, I decided to try and bring some order to my websites. Instead of maintaining everything locally, I thought it would be cool to learn Perl and write a few basic scripts to manage things. The scripts worked OK (most of the time) but I discovererd that I just didn't like synchronizing from server to local. I was more comfortable syncing the other direction, and I liked the idea that my local copy was "the master".
Now, this is with scripts that I wrote, on a server where I have control of my data, on websites that are just for fun, and I still didn't like it.
I had suspected this before, but the experience confirmed it. At that point I have to ask myself, "Why am I willing to let Slashdot control my posts?". The only answers I can come up with are:
1. I was preconditioned by USENET that comments are somewhat expendable.
2. because they tend to be topical, I am not overly concerned about preserving them.
That said, it would be nice if Slashdot made it easier to access any post that I had ever archived. As it stands, Google can pull up a lot of them. The very nature of corporate ASPs is such that Google is not going to archive your data... at least, I hope not... hmm... but if the data were encrypted you could scam on all that Google capacity (evil grin).
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Early adopter should be re-phrased "Early adapter" since You are the plug-in. :)
Close to 70% of survey respondents said their company has no plans to upgrade to any Microsoft XP products (operating system, Office) at this time. Slightly more than one quarter of IT professionals surveyed are considering Linux as an alternative operating system to Microsoft and 65% are not considering alternatives at this time.
What on earth are you licensing for that price? Visual Studio for every salesman?
sulli
RTFJ.
At our small to mid size government shop we looked long and hard at the subscription service. The flaw for us it that the subscription service is based on upgrading every two years. We do not have the resources to roll out new OS/Productivity every two years. We are now upgrading from Win95 to Win2K and that will take 2 years alone. We calculated a 4 to 5 year cycle and with that purchasing the software outright is cheaper.
Why?
1... MS's WHOREing pricing policy... high prices for crappy software.
2... MS's insecure software... companies and corporations are not going to stand for viruses and worms hitting their systems every few weeks... data recovery is expensive.
3... MS's illegal business practices... as well as illegal tax and dividend practices.
4... Companies are increasingly wary that MS is looking over their shoulder... if viruses can send your email around... what's to keep MS from looking all over your hard drive for insider information, mail information etc... CONSIDER this as well, if you are a government... are YOU going to let your data be read by others outside the office (whether by virus, or by secret intent?). I think not!
Corporations are sick of being whored.... in our own corporation we are phasing out all MS products and computers. As each machine retires, it is being replaced by UNIX boxes (SUN, OSX etc).
So not only is MS's business practices going to kill itself... it will kill Intel, DELL, Compaq, and right down the line... as people are convinced that anything with MS on it is appaling insecure... overpriced... and not worth the gamble.
Say NO to microsoft... say NO to their forced pricing changes... say NO to SOFTWARE UPDATE (just how many new features do you need anyway)... and say NO to their proposed INCREASED SECURITY -- there are plenty of secure systems out there today... that don't require rewriting... and that don't crash... and that don't email your private data to the entire world.
Basically, we're a java/Linux shop and Windows installs are regarded as a necessary evil. There are some things that we have to do that for both licensing and technical reasons (the media player HAS to be part of the operating system, right?) need to be run on windows. But every windows install is an ongoing liability. They're a pain to build and configure, unreliable, configurations differ for no apparent reason, managing large numbers of rackmounts is a nightmare, etc. etc. You've heard it all before. But the advent of XP fills us with dread. The question is not whether we'll adopt it, but whether this one will seriously damage the company.
It kind of feels like the living in Sarajevo and being shelled by the troops up on the hill. Incoming! Licensing bombs have hit the spiders, sarge! Oh no! More breakage in the media crackers! Can we repair it or do we have to abandon the codec? I mean, it's a wintel world out there, and ours is a volume business, and if we reimplement stuff ourselves we'll be attacked by hordes of mutant ninja lawyers.
It's not like we can ignore it. Bill farts, we run for cover. We are small, the death star is merciless.
As a M$ shareholder, I beg to differ. When they were selling product in the normal way (with perpetual licenses and no asinine "activation"), my shares were worth $135 or so, and split fairly regularly. They bombed down to around $40 because of the DoJ thing and the general dot-com slide, but that's become a non-factor -- by now everyone knows M$ is going to get away with whatever they want, and the dot-bombs have all long since detonated.
IMO the biggest reason M$'s share price has not rebounded (and is still hovering at about $60 and hasn't split in ages) is NOT because of ongoing fear about M$'s future under the DoJ's eye, but because subscription licensing, WPA, the overblown cost to value ratio for WinXP, and similar bullshit, have degraded the value of M$ where the real money is, in the corporate purchasing dept.
So as a M$ shareholder, this nonsense is COSTING me money. It sure as hell isn't doing anything positive for my stock value!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
No fair! You can't leave it lying just like that!
What the hell was the problem????
OT: I once worked on a proprietary system, where the best way to crash the box was to leave it alone for 6 hours (there was an error in the timer logic -- we fixed as soon as we found it).
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
What about thoss massive online games such as Everquest? Why would anyone want to be ripped off by such business model when alternative is available?
Did anyone catch the part where they were talking about the Enterprise Agreement:
"But joining means CIOs must also sign a contract that bars them from using any competitive products."
Does that sound like I think it sounds? Does anyone know anything about it?
Gosh, it's a good thing that the DOJ settlement will prevent these kinds of shenanigans, I feel safer already.
...is that M$'s new licensing tactics have me actually getting real, focused attention when I mention Linux for workstations. Two years ago I was walking around mumbling about how cool this stuff was to deaf ears and now I have actual test machines! Can you believe it? I work in local government (Harris County, TX) and in my particular section we have around 300 workstations. Wonder how many other places this is happening in?
No shit, sounds like a HARDWARE problem at that point. He just argued himself out of an argument!
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Been playing the Half-life Beta 1.4, and they switched it to a "cache" file system. You have to download some part of the program every time. Also no lan play. They also get to charge a nice subscription fee also. Only bad part, is you have to cache every game for the levels to load. How do you cache a 500 meg game over a modem? The only nice feature, is you can cache in the background, while you do other things. Good thing, they stop the cheating for now.
The rumors are, if you own an older version you dont have to pay a subscription, if buy the newer online only version, you have to pay a subscription fee. Ka-Ching!
The problem with trying to rule the world by buying it is...who's selling?
Albeit the devil wants you to buy the world from him, but the concept it the same. If no one gets hooked on Gate's vision of an MS World, what does he have left?
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."...Tyler Durden
You should try. ABIWord, StarOffice, OpenOffice, Corel?
MS has no standards. MSOffice formats are not, and never were recognised, as any type of standard file format. Maybe going with true standard file formats would be a better idea. There are many out there.
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Is this a sig?
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It's the expensive subscriptions that don't. Who wants to pay full price for a new copy of MS Word every year when the one from five years ago still works. A $5-$10 a year subscription over the lifetime of a product would go over very well, but a $50-$100 one will ALWAYS fail.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I think the big problem with software as a service is that people think they own software right now. Most home users I know don't bother to read the license -- they think it's a combination of a warantee and a "do not copy" clause. Most corporate users I know think the same thing -- and some of them think that the license exists to protect THEM (this has come up in some of the Free Software conversations I've had: "but there's no license! Who can we hold responsible?").
They are, of course, wrong from a legal standpoint. But the interesting thing is that whatever reality is, perception affects buying just as much, and since buyers currently think they actually purchase the software, trying to get them to do something else is tricky.
It will, of course, be interesting to see what happens as technical efforts to drive the legal reality of not owning software home increase. I'm not sure if it'll result in people raising hell and a revolution, or if they'll just lowe a little and move along like so many cattle.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
In my case, I meant the timer *software* logic... actually, it was in the timer queue allocator/deallocator.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
M$'s Database was $5,000 per processor, and if you have an 8 processor machine.... :)
Yes. Linux/BSD/UNIX will always be a bit cheaper.
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The licenses are often strict, like we only get a couple of SQLServer licenses, but in general it meets, and has met everything we needed. I wonder what the difference between that model and MS's 'new' subscription model is....
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
(* One more point against ASPs, which I keep running into: Many businesses want to develop and run their own apps so they can create intellectual property they can later make money from. This happens very often in specialised industries. *)
Normally you wouldn't want to outsource things directly related to your competative advantages. For example, if you are a taxi company, then your fleet management and car tracking should probably be mostly in-house so that you are not dependent on another company to keep it up to date and flexible (unless perhaps it requires special technologies like satellite traicking, etc.)
However, things like e-mail, payroll, supply purchasing, etc. would be ripe for outsourcing there because those are not your core business.
Wal-mart should not outsource its pricing and procurement management system, because that is partly what makes it better (more competitive) than say Kmart.
Things like payroll and email could perhaps be considered comodities and are ripe for oursourcing.
Table-ized A.I.
As noted the new interface may have some benefits but there's an associated learning curve (nothing matches the screenshots and yes that throws lots of folks.)
XP is 90-something percent backwards compatible but that few percent is where madness lies. Not all vendors certify or support their products on XP yet which leads into fingerpointing hell. For those that do it requires the latest version which means another rollout and likely more licensing costs (for something we may have had running fine, paid for and satified with under 2K.) Again, do the benefits outweigh the costs & risks?
XP undoubtably includes a newer driver set but its also not backwards compatible with all of the hardware currently running under 2K. Some percentage of cards / readers / scanners / printers / security devices / etc. won't work and will need to be identified and replaced.
There was a benefit going from DOS to Windows - it had a GUI and just as importantly unified printer and video drivers. Windows 95 offered many more services and greatly improved stability. Win98 et al was a less compelling upgrade but at least it meant yet more stability and new drivers. NT 3.51 was rocky but continued to improve, albeit with the Great Interface Shift. WinME went nowhere for most folks. Win2k does well enough though most places are still wrestling if/with ADS. XP - XP offers what? And is what it offers worth the costs?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Your a little off here - I said that I seen a lot of posts stating that NT4 is running fine. I didn't say it was a better web server than 2000.
I did say that NT4 is eaiser to secure. That is certainly true. In 2000 you have to mess around with policys and about 10 times the services running on the box than you did with an NT4 box. I have 14 steps to secure an NT4 IIS box. With 2000 it takes me about 2 hours to make sure its locked down correctly. Seems eaiser on an NT4 box to me - IMHO.
And who cares if it goes on the unsupported list this year. When was the last time that you called M$ support??? Never?? - yea me neither... and they will still come out with hot fixes for it - so big deal.
Actually I would like to convert all our web servers to BSD/Apache - This way I could worry about a lot less - but the suits want to go the M$ way so theres not a lot I can do about it...
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.
"I have 14 steps to secure an NT4 IIS box. "
Then you probably are not adequately securing your NT4 IIS box.
Using policies on Win2k you can go quite far. If there are services you don't want running, then can be defaulted to disabled through a policy. Registry entries, file permissions, and a variety of account and system settings can be automated through policies.
Locking down the IIS configuration is more difficult, but you could either use the IIS Lockdown tool. Or if your web servers tend to be identical this could be accomplished through WSH scripts.
Some of these automation and policy objects are available with NT4, but not all, which is why I say it's easier to lock down Win2k.
Securing a Win2k IIS server through group policy objects is the topic of the GCNT practical I'm currently working on, so I think I'm pretty familiar with this.
MS will stop releasing hotfixes for NT4. That's what being "unsupported" means. Besides, we call Microsoft for support quite frequently, and they've been very helpful.
Maybe instead of pining away for BSD/Apache, you should spend your efforts learning the platform you currently support. Attending the SANS Conference track on Securing Windows 2000 is quite enlightening.
This post has GOT to be a joke. 3.1 up to NT??? Only reason not to go to Linux is a lack of support for MS-fileformats? let me guess - you mean OFFICE file format? This is NOT a barrier!! Your techy peeps are NOT very good sadly *sigh* Another sole lost :)
Believe it, there are still lots of large shops running Windows 3.x and will be for quite some time to come. The thing that bothers me is that he's claiming to be installing NT now. If you've been keeping up with MS's end-of-lifing products in an accelerated premature forced obsolescence manner, you'll have known that they *ceased* distributing all furthur new NT 4.0 (workstation or server) licenses and installation media as of 11/30/2001 thru all of their "MOLP" programs, and the "oldest" licenses (of the NT-based OS's) they sell now is W2K.
You're probably close to truth than MS would like to admit. Of course I was just guessing that's what the execs are thinking when they say "maximize shareholder value." I don't agree with that way of thinking, but it's possible that's how steve ballmer sees it. Alot of tech sectors see faster cycles as a way to increase revenues, be it good or bad. I've heard more than one business development director make that kind of statement and say it's modeled after MS. Now whether that is true or not is a different story. Don't quote me on it, but I remember past interviews with gates and ballmer that expressed that sentiment. In a couple interviews about XP, gates and ballmer gave their reasons were "it makes updates more incremental and allow us to get out newer releases faster (ie more revenue)."
You just can't call MS and expect support
Period.
I'll admit that the policys are probly fine and work well once you spend the time with them. But its a learning curve for the policys stuff - and not a very easy one for me. I pretty much support a 35 system / 16 TB data center by myself. I have used some of the tools too - and they are OK - but tend to shut down some stuff that you need to have running. Just like the C2 tool did to NT4 years ago.
I keep up with the patches and monitoring the logs and everything else manually - they won't spend the money for ELM, SecureIIS etc... But I do keep them secure - Oh and I CAN adequately secure an NT4 IIS box in about 14 steps. Got it right from M$'s web and took out the crap. But its behind a PIX firewall (that I take care of too) so only the stupid stuff, like leaving the default web site running and such, would make it insecure anyway.
You should do some home work too. M$ is going to write hotfixes for NT 4 till Jan 1, 2005. 3 years would be enough time to keep NT4 around.
And as far as pining for BSD - they won't even hear about it - so I dont spend too much time with it. But as with OpenBSD - a 4 year default install with NO hacks to it. Sounds like a pretty secure box to me.
Duke
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.
John Walker (of AutoDesk, not the terrorist!) describes the exact model in his online book "The AutoDesk File". From http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_106. html
(note that this was written in 1993!)
Comparing software programs to TV programs: "I believe that soon we're not going to buy computer programs either, we're going to subscribe to them. Programs are programs."
Redmond, Washington, March 20, 1992. Transcript (from memory) of meeting of John Walker and John Forbes of Autodesk and Bill Gates and Todd Needham of Microsoft.
Walker: So let me see if I understand where you're going with this, Bill. What you'd really like is if in, say, five years, everybody with a computer gets a Microsoft bill every month, just like a telephone bill, for each product they use.
Gates: Precisely.
"Quite simply, to derive enough revenue from a subscription strategy to make the business run, you have to have the lion's share of the market, not a small slice. To get people to subscribe, you have to have demonstrated technological leadership that convinces them they'll get more value by paying you regularly than buying from somebody else outright, then replacing the product later on. And of course the central development engine needs to be big enough to keep generating the value that gives subscribers value for their money, year in and year out."
"By 2003, I believe that [...] the software industry will have restructured itself from a costly and unpredictable bookstore/appliance dealer sale-oriented model to a cable TV-like subscription model. The companies who emerge from the turbulence of this transition will be the colossi of the industry, no more and no less inherently risky than television networks, book publishers, or regional telephone companies. Their revenues, measured in the billions to tens of billions will fund ongoing product development aimed and increasing their subscription base."
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
These may sound somewhat trivial, but in my business (banking) data and process ownership are crucial.
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
The current model of software with a fixed purchase price handles one thing well, though. If you feel that an upgrade to a newer version is worth the price of that version, you will buy it. There are problems with this, of course. It encourages bugs in software that you can promise to fix in future versions, since that adds value to the upgrades. But anyway, that's the basic incentive mechanism for the software developer. The consumer has bargaining power by saying "no, that upgrade is too expensive and not worth it, so I won't pay."
The subscription model doesn't work here. If M$ got everyone on a subscription plan, they would have no incentive to improve their software, and every incentive to raise the subscription cost each year. If the consumer decides that they don't like the increased subscription cost, or that the upgrades are too pitiful to warrant the subscription, what can they do? If they refuse the subscription, then they loose the software they have and are sunk.
I seem to recall that the software on MSDN was explicitly NOT intended for other uses, and the license says as much. E.g. you can use the MSDN exchange server for developing products that interact with exchange -- but not for your real email. You can use the copy of office for developing, but not for word-processing.
Maybe it's changed, but that's what I remember.
Interestingly, though, this can make life difficult for the vendor. While the subscription model has its advantages (dependable revenue stream even after 100% customer adoption of your product, low incremental start-up costs for your customers), it can also be deadly to a startup.
The basic problem is that costs grow at the same rate for a company selling shrink-wrapped software or subscription software. However, where shrink-wrapped vendors get paid in large chunks (at least for serious enterprise software, $50K++), subscription vendors get paid in increments. As a result, revenues can severely lag costs--you've borne the expense of developing, selling and supporting the product, but you haven't recouped much money until you sign up lots of customers (leading to rising sales and support costs).
In a profitable company, this isn't deadly. But for a startup, every dollar in losses must be funded through selling stock. Booking revenues is the best way to increase the value of your company and to give up less stock in each sale, thereby preserving your ownership. In times like these, when funding is hard to come by, slow revenue progress can equal death.
The other issue, which applies to all companies, is that you're putting off a stream of payments (revenues) into the future, instead of collecting it all at once. Based on the time value of money, the sum of the subcription payments must exceed the up-front purchase price (as there is a discount factor for dollars to be collected way out into the future). The basic idea is that if you had the full lump sum today, you could invest it over the same time period of the contract. To your customers, it's a wash economically. But in a competitive market, it might be trouble, as it might mean you have to charge incrementally higher prices, leaving you vulnerable to competitors.
Finally, figuring out the pricing of an ASP subscription is really tough. How many months of payments should be required to have equalled the up-front license cost? Set it too low, and your customers get sticker shock. Set it too high, and you just put your own revenues further and further out into the future. Software pricing can be pretty arbitrary to begin with, and ASP models can add a layer of complexity. It's not that they can't succeed--plenty of businesses bill per-month. It's just a question of whether it's the right model for enterprise software companies.
also OT: remember when they discovered that bug in Windows 98 where if it was up for something like 150 days straight, it would crash? Remember how that news came out in, like, 1999? That was funny. You just reminded me of it.
Synergy is your friend
> That's what all companies do. They can't afford to support...
No, cost is no issue. We spent over three months proving our NT4 production was stable, and we're not the vendor... we're the customer. Then we froze it.
We did this because if it crashes, people (you) die. Maybe one or two at a time, or quite likely entire city blocks may dissapear from a gas explosion. Period.
I don't think I'd find too many people who'd want me to chance their butts on something new and unnecessary, when what's existing is already working *exactly* as needed, and will continue to do so for quite some time. Some things should NOT be screwed with in a spurious manner.
- SBB
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Okay, it's been a few years... let's see if I can remember this right...
- Exchange Server is hard wired to crash if there is less than 20 MB left on the drive where the daily message logs are kept.
- This system had a dedicated 40 GB RAID partition for log files, and half of it was free.
- The backup software was ArcServe 6 (IIRC), backups were going to a DLT changer, and everything was working properly. (I could verify any backup I wanted to, they were fine.)
Nothing odd to this point, everything's working like it should. Right? Now here's where it started going south:- I didn't spend a lot of time staring at this thing, since I was out of ideas (and being billed at $185/hour). I hopped on the knowledge base, we got on the phone with MS (with credit card in hand) and... got told we needed a better computer. Something on the order of
- "...obviously you're running Exchange on a server that isn't equipped to handle the load." There were only 30 users! Yes, a couple of them did have 500 MB mail stores, but that wasn't the point -- when it had been working, it had worked just fine!
- "Sometimes Exchange won't properly remove the old log files when it's been notified by the backup service (whichever one you have installed) of a successful backup. It marks the files as removed, hence they don't appear on the disk or appear to take up disk space... but they still are. Shut down Exchange, backup the partition, format the partition and then restore the files.
I ran into a similar problem on a much smaller machine serving a 3 person office -- this time, it was MS Backup instead of ArcServe... same problem. The drive only had ~800 MB free anyway, and there were performance complaints... so this problem stood out in my mind. Worked then, too.We ended up calling another fellow who had worked on this machine before. When I finally got him on the phone, he had this little pearl:
It worked.
$185 an hour to babysit a backup & restore job... Boy, I sure wish I could get a job like that again.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Sure, a lot of the new XP features you mentioned are not of significant corporate benefit. However, there are at least two XP-only features that may end up being very important to corporations:
- Remote desktop from XP pro -- allows your users to connect to their computer remotely and continue using their applications where they left off before. Great for VPNing in from home. I personally use this feature a lot. Unfortunately for the employee, this makes it very easy to work on weekends from home, but employers probably won't mind.
- Remote assistance. Invaluable feature for IT help desks, especially in large corporations. Saves you hours of painful voice-only walkthroughs that end in a trip to the user's desk anyway. "...ok, right click on Properties, choose the Advanced tab...".
DOk, I admit it's continual propaganda...
I don't troll, new zealanders and australians speak and write a bit differently to americans.
speaking of censorware, I'm being censored by Echelon as an Economic threat to current cryptography systems.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
viruses. That's what you need protection from.
It's funny. Laugh.
"Do we really need all this stuff for a web server, or a file server, or even an app server in most cases."
No, not individually, but you do if you are making a generic OS which could be used for any one of those tasks.
"I'll admit that the policys are probly fine and work well once you spend the time with them. "
No understandable. We have the same problems at work, there's no time to bleed just get it done.
"But as with OpenBSD - a 4 year default install with NO hacks to it. Sounds like a pretty secure box to me."
Yeah, but it doesn't do anything. What's the point? It's sort of like running the C2 tool on Windows, yeah it makes it secure but it sure doesn't help you get work done.
"M$ is going to write hotfixes for NT 4 till Jan 1, 2005."
Well ok, if you are willing to pay for them, hotfixes will no longer be release for free after Jan 1, 2003. And non-security related ones wouldn't even be offered after Jan 1, 2004.
It's basically end of the line.
Honestly with as many problems as we solved moving our Web and App servers from NT4 to Win2k I cannot possibly imagine why people still use NT4.
But we have business people who claim NT4 is good enough for their desktops and they don't want to buy XP. Ok, great, but stop complaining about problems.
The thing about the future is...
Something Could Happen.
As a business owner, you want to minimise uncertainty. Having an enterprise, large or small, run on SW that will quit working on day X brings up all kinds of previously irrelevant fears.
What if we're "going a little broke"? Will the upgrade bill (whatever it is; no certainty there either) kill us just when we need to weather the storm? Maybe everything stops, and we can't keep on keeping on while we try to figure out how to get back to profitability.
What do you think the bean counters (who are running the company under court protection) are going to say to a huge license renewal when we're restructuring?
For a small business, this is really troubling stuff; all it would take is one large enterprise getting shut down (read all about it) "because the license renewal wasn't viable at this time", and the operative word will be "nix" as in "nix that, we're going Open Source now while we still can".