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.)

Comments

MS apparently loves quietly changing things...

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Some licenses do/did, some not

[msobkow]

There are four common commercial licenses:

1. System licensing requires a seperate license for each machine.
2. User/Seat licensing requires a seperate license for each user, but not each machine.
3. Session licensing requires a license for each process, user, or device that is using the product, including those that access the product with sharing/concentrator products (e.g. the webserver only has 10 active database connections, but 300 users, so 300 session licenses are required.)
4. Corporate licensing is negotiated on a per-customer basis and sometimes includes the most "interesting" terms and conditions.

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!