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Sun Introduces Subscription Solaris
cyberlync writes "Sun is planning to implement a pricing policy similar to Microsoft's recent subscription pricing plan. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president of software, said that they are calling this project Orion. It looks like another attempt to grab more cash in this nasty economy to me. Schwartz said that they are going to try a similar senario with linux soon as well. On a side note, it mentions some interesting things about a new desktop distro of linux."
No one is arguing that Sun should provide free software. The complaint is that Sun is raising its prices without adding any new value.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
In a lot of ways, Sun is the MS of the commercial UNIX world, but they have an impressive record of making contributions to the community. the most notable contribution was probably NFS, and Sun gave it away long before most of us had ever heard of the GPL. Solaris has lots of goodies in it, obviously including great NFS support, but also pleasant standardisation and maturity, which Linux still somewhat lacks. Solaris is also rock solid. Sure, Linux can have multi-year uptimes, but it doesn't really compare to Solaris. When you want to run a giant website with 100's of CPU's, you turn to Solaris, and you don't even care that you get raped on the price of the hardware.
I imagine that Sun is doing this because they know they won't make any money pushing beige box PC's. (SGI sure didn't.) By just selling the OS, they may not sell a ton of copies, but the profit margins on software are pretty sweet, if you can pay off the cost of development.
...Sun won't be around much longer.
We're moving our servers to Linux as it is, so a move like this is hardly going to make us think twice about it.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
I don't like this move to subscription that has become popular. Macromedia also is trying to do it.
It's great for the provider - over time it makes you a lot more money, and you get a more regular cash flow. And it eases the pressure to come up with major releases. You can just make minor improvements regularly to justify the charge. Fixing bugs and security holes should not be considered a service - it is repairing a faulty product.
So as a provider, it's great. But as a customer, it's not so good - stuff basically ends up being more expensive, and you get locked in to one provider.
I think it is a development that needs to be resisted. Profit margins are far too high on a lot of software anyway. This kind of move just makes OSS solutions even more attractive.
It seems software amd hardware companies are nostalgic for the good ole days when a server or desktop had a service life of about 1.5 to 2 years due to obsolence which was in effect similar to a subscription.
Now the pace of change has slowed down and so has need to buy new systems. Companies like MS and Sun are trying maintain and expand revenue without offering any compelling reason to upgrade. So they are now "innovating" with pricing.
Remember, they are a company responsible to shareholders. Sun is tanking, the economy is tanking - what is Sun supposed to do? This shouldn't be a blame game but a step back to evaluate what Sun is doing and why they are doing it (to post a profit not a loss for starters).
We buy solars subscriptions for our low end x1 style sun boxes already. Its sold as hardware support without the hardware support but we get access to the current releases.
What I would like is a subscript deal where we get a copy of the current version (what ever it is and with all the patches applied) when its shipped. I only want the install cd, I don't need the other cd's they like shipping out. Right now it costs me about $100 to download a cd at current rates and it it shouldn't cost Sun Australia more than about $20 to send a real CD to me. I only need one media subscription so this is different than the license issue.
Since I can think I wondered why software is treated so differently than other products. It would make sense to forbid this by law.
For basically the same thing, e. g. WinNT Workstation and Server, which differ in 3 reg keys, they charge different prices, and it's said to be illegal to change this three keys. This would be the same if a car manufacturer would forbid you tuning your car!
Also this license crap (fortunately here in Germany they don't apply with standard software), nobody would accept any license bullshit when buying a car that would e. g. limit the persons in the car to two (in comparison to "1-2 cpu only"), but for software, nobody seems to care.
Kosi
Check out the guy's presentation:
Jonathan Schwartz presentation
Page 23:
All software will move to one distribution, and three licensing models - Traditional, Predictable and Metered
So comparing what Sun plans to what Microsoft has already done is rubbish.
You can buy non-subscription from Microsoft too. It just costs more. I'm sure the same is true of Sun.
From the article I got the impression that they are going to merge their SUN ONE stack with Solaris and bundle the whole package as the 'OS'. This idea has been touted previously and greeted with some scepticism as a feeble attempt by SUN to 'win' application server market share from the big boys and drawn comparrison to the usual Redmond type ploys.
Mad Hatter would seem to reinforce this as an attempt to retain workstation market share rather than an attempt to compete directly with MS on the average desktop by delivering the whole sun development package at a stroke. Its a risky strategy though. Existing manufactures like Dell and HP will murder them on hardware pricing and with a bunch of Linus distros to choose from what makes the Sun one a compelling sell ?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Sigh,
Companies can't resist the temptation to seek out money for no effort.
I can understand the logic of buying things. I give you money, you give me product or service, I get value.
However, the logic of subscriptions for software is beyond me.
I give you money, you give me product. I use product and get value. Then I give you more money for telephone support, and you give me telephone support. I get value. So far so good. But now suddenly you ask me for more money or else I can't keep on using what I have already bought. You don't have to do any more work, I don't get any more value but yet money changes hands.
And this is not just payment by instalments. If I can't pay the price up front, then by all means do me a deal where I borrow the money and pay quarterly.
These business models cannot survive where the users have a choice.
You know, many of you may find this hard to believe, but a lot of big companies actually want a subscription model for their software (and increasingly, hardware too).
It makes cost planning a lot easier and moves big purchases off the balance sheet and onto the P&L. Companies want to know how much something will cost over a period of time - subscription gives them that. Buying the software up-front requires irritating amortization and depreciation models, and decisions on the lifetime of the product and what any upgrade cycle will be. CFOs like monthly expenses more than big capital purchases.
IBM are leading the charge towards "utility computing". You can buy UNIX boxen from them with spare CPUs, where you can ring them up and ask for more processing power for more $/month. They want their software providers to follow suit and, for example, allow users to just increase their application server subscription to another processor on demand.
Sun are just following the market.
"Microsoft's recent subscription pricing plan"? Microsoft has no "recent subscription pricing plan". All that talk ever was, was a lot of paranoia talk from people who didn't really know what Microsoft meant as "software as a service" when .NET first came out.
Someone link me to more information about this "recent subscription pricing plan", please. Karma awaits!
samrolken
Sun also will continue to offer its traditional per-CPU pricing model for its Sun ONE stack and Solaris, Schwartz said.
Since they're now evidently offering companies a greater choice in how they're going to get their product, there is a very big difference between what they're doing and what MS is trying to do. As I understood it, MS was offering NO choice as to pricing model, which was made more onerous by the great leverage MS has over its customers as a result of limited choice in the Windows world.
The fact that Sun customers will have a choice of pricing model means Sun's not trying to bulldoze anyone, and should be praised instead of vilified as the poster tries to do, since subscription plans can make very good sense for some customers. Extending the range of choices is never a bad thing as long as the set of choices always includes the choices you had before.
... Well, at least it's not necessarily about making more money. It's primarily to regularize cash income for companies who have had a cyclic stock price tied to their release cycles.
In fact, they want to do this so much that they'll sometimes make that option more attractive than purchasing: they're willing to sacrifice a little income if it means it's going to be flowing regularly instead of in chunks.
It's probably cheaper this way. If you don't like it then you'll still have the option of buying your software ala carte like you do now. This isn't really that big of a deal. Some companies (especially the federal government) LOVE having a nice flat yearly payment to make. We have tons of maintenance contracts on a yearly basis that are basically the same idea. You pay the maintenance contract, you always get the newest software. *shrug* Sure, it sucks if you're used to free GPL'd Linux products, but if you're used to buying thousands of dollars in software a year it will probably save you lots of money.
1- This is not Sun changing the pricing for Solaris. Nowhere is it stated that Sun will stop issuing/honoring the Solaris RTU for systems with less than four CPUs.
2- Orion will not just be selling Solaris, it will "build all of Sun's software into the Solaris OS and offer a yearly subscription for Solaris, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president of software, said at the vendor's Worldwide Analyst Conference here."
That means no more licensing headaches for people using Sun's software for Solaris. Just one subscription for the directory tools, the management tools, etc.. Orion will make business with Sun easy for companies with money to burn and no time to spend dealing with it, and Sun has plenty of customers like that.
Which is complete nonsense. "Orion" isn't just Solaris. It's Solaris with an added directory server, portal server, identity server, web server , app server, calendar server, cluster management , and god knows what else.
Sheesh, I can't believe the stuff that gets modded up sometimes.
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
Solaris is going to stay at the same price. At least according to the NYTimes article about it.
What sun is doing is charging for sun one and putting everything together on a central cd where the user can check what he/she wants.
This is what Microsoft plans to do. You get one central cd with only Microsoft products and you check what you would like and then a price tag would pop out and from there your solution is done. I think they are waiting for drm and pallidium to make sure this solution is cracker proof before providing it.
You could have a stand alone Windows2k3 server install or you can have it with office, vstudio.net, sql server and exchange server for hell of alot more. Its a great way of stomping their competition. Just like puting IE with Windows, corporate customers will be less reluctant to call oracle, have a salesman come, sign a license, play around with the cd, for an evaluation before purchasing. Or they can just point and click on the default MS cd and select SQL Server. Done! The easiest way is a no brainer.
Sun wants this as well because according to the NYtimes version of the story because their bussiness model is too reliant on sales of hardware. IBM was insulating from the spending crunch of the
Apple is already trying this with
http://saveie6.com/