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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.
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).
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
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.