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MS Tweaks Ill-Received Licensing Plan
ahooton writes "C|Net is
reporting that
Microsoft has updated it's
Software Assurance licensing program. The company has admitted that it's initial approach angered a large number of customers. No huge difference in pricing or terms -- changes are comprised of bundling some training and support. The one interesting concession is that corporate licensees of Microsoft Office can now use that suite on a home computer as well." What a concession. (Paddo points to this similar article on Australian IT via News.com.au.)
No, you could. It's not any different. Some people are just slow to pick up on things.
Don't know about the Software Assurance program, but the academic Campus Agreement 3.0 has had the "Work at Home" clauses in it for a while now. Though in traditional MS fashion they've made one minor change in the new revision 3.1... from what I understand from reading the pages, we can't let employees check out a set of install discs and the Volume License key anymore.
Now the only option is to have employees bring in their machines while we install (don't even want to think about the liability issues there) or buy official MS copies of the media, for $7-20 each in minimum quantities of 25, which supposedly come with their own keys. If we have 1500 employees who each want a copy of Office XP, at $7 a copy we now have a nice added expense of $10,500, not to mention the logistics hassles of media ordering and inter-departmental chargebacks.
Of course, those new keys are the 1-machine-only activation-enabled version, while the older agreement let us give out the activation-free Volume License keys and just keep a few sets of CDs at the helpdesk for check-out.
Ugh. Gotta love MS.
(posted anon to protect my employer)
I'll admit it. I use Office. Office 2003 beta, even. I'm not one to often run beta software as my primary system unless there is a compelling reason. The redesigned Outlook provides me with the reason -- I haven't found a good replacement for Outlook yet -- Evolution doesn't cut it. I've used pretty much everything out there: WordPerfect/Quattro since DOS-based versions; MS Office since it was a DOS-based product; WordStar (yes - WordStar); IBM's Writing Assistant; StarOffice 5.2 and 6; and OO.o. Yep - OO.o is a great system. I actually like it a lot, but use Office exclusively at this point.
>Why should anything short of a kernel upgrade require a reboot?
Because 3rd party (and Microsoft, for that matter) developers are too lazy, or ignorant, to write robust installers. With Windows 2000 and up, one only needs to reboot if a kernel mode driver is being installed the installer is running under Terminal Services, where some rules of engagement are different than if running under console.
If I were to take a guess, based on the installer project I worked on, 90% of reboots were requested because some file was locked. Nevermind the fact that OS provides good ways for handling such cases without needed to reboot, if you're not messing with contents of System32, which is a bad place to drop your libs in the first place.
There are four common commercial licenses:
Microsoft is just conceding corporations the right to per-seat/user licensing, which is already one of the most common product licensing arrangements in the industry.
Don't underestimate the impact to Microsoft's bottom line. Under prior interpretations, Microsoft was requiring the corporations to pay for two licenses per telecommuting employee instead of one. They were also requiring extra licenses for failover systems which aren't intended to be used unless the primary fails!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.