Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Flip-flopping on Virtualization License
Cole writes "Microsoft came within a few hours of reversing its EULA-based ban on the virtualization of Vista Basic and Premium, only to cancel the announcement at the last minute. The company reached out to media and bloggers about the announcement and was ready to celebrate "user choice" before pulling the plug, apparently clinging to security excuses. From the article, "The threat of hypervisor malware affects Ultimate and Business editions just as much as Home Premium and Basic. As such, the only logical explanation is that Microsoft is using pricing to discourage users from virtualizing those OSes. Since when is a price tag an effective means of combating malware?" Something else must be going on here."
Only if you believe that EULAs are enforcable.
Artificially introduced market segmentation.
Seperate the user base by requirements. To match a low, medium and high priced product range, when there is no real difference between the actual products other than artificial restrictions.
By specifically disbaling certain features from the low versions, power users (the few who will touch Visat with a bargepole), will be forced to empty their bank accounts for the high version (Vista Ultimate/Business), otherwise they may just buy the version which could do everything they required (which would be cheaper).
Less revenue for Microsoft.
This is similar to the recent debate over MS Visual Studio Express vs. Professional. The former's EULA disallowing plugins of some variety which actually loaded fine. This forced users to buy the uncrippled version for actual development. More money to MS.
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face - Ben Williams
The reason Microsoft wants to keep the cost high to virtualize Vista is because they want people to actually run Vista as the main os. When lots of people start running linux (or parallels on macs), they are using Vista simply as a bunch of libraries to run one or two apps.
They want to remain in control of the platform, if people use mac or linux as their main os and use Windows to run one of those not-yet-supported programs the power of Microsoft wil start to degrade...
Dependency hell? =>
"Something else must be going on here". No shit sherlock.
The thing that's going on is market segmentation [wikipedia.org]. To put it briefly: Microsoft reckons that those customers who are likely to want to run Vista in a virtual environment have got the money to buy a more expensive version.
If it was that simple, Microsoft wouldn't conflict itself so much. There are many more things going on, not the least of which, is the virtualization on the Mac (not a core Mac user myself).
Mac+OSX has still many disadvantages on its own, the biggest of which is vendor support for software and games. Parallels integrates relatively seamlessly virtualized Windows into a Mac.
Under virtualization, you really don't need more than Vista Home, since you can't run Aero anyway, so people would naturally flock to that. Many PC owners are willing to switch to Mac today, as long as they have a seamless Windows experience, which they still need.
Microsoft isn't just trying to make a buck, they're trying to decrease the rate of Vista/Windows virtualization. The problem here is: they can't change the license of XP which is out there already and people run that on their Macs.
So the conflict (at least part of it) is: forbid virtualization on cheap Vista (and thus stiffle Vista adoption as people run their XP on Macs), or allow virtualization since XP already allows virtualization anyway.
And only after all those strategy issues are resolved, comes the question if Microsoft could make more buck with expensive virtualizable Vista: corporate customers usually need to virtualize Windows for testing. But they don't really need a ton of copies for that purpose. A 1000 employee company may need just 5-6 licenses for the 5-6 developers who specifically need to do testing of their software. Hence the buck making potential isn't really quite there.
Microsoft isn't stupid, and they can see the writing on the wall. Switchers pose a problem for Microsoft, because most anecdotal evidence and many studies show that switchers don't switch back to Windows. Now before you bash me as an Apple fanboi, consider this: most people who leave Windows are looking for an out due to frustration. Even if you think Mac OS X is inferior to Windows, someone looking to get away from Windows might not be the most objective person in the world. Apple's plan is to get people to switch, to just taste OS X, and then count on them not going back to Windows. Intel Macs make it "safe" for users to try it, because they can always fall back to Windows if OS X doesn't work out for them.
The most ridiculous part of the MS strategy, though, is to assume people pay attention to the EULA anyway. I recently installed XP on my Intel Mac on to a boot camp partition. Parellels is smart enough to see the boot camp partition and run in VM mode. Is that "illegal"? Will Microsoft come kick in my door? Would I be able to do the same thing with Vista (probably) even though the EULA states I can't?
Mac OSX Home Basic 129$
;-)
Mac OSX Home Premium 129$
Mac OSX Business 129$
Mac OSX Ultimate 129$
Ubuntu Home Basic 0$
Ubuntu Home Premium 0$
Ubuntu Business 0$
Ubuntu Ultimate 0$
A both OSes have home versions which allow restore of backuped Data...
For Vista you need Ultimate or Business to get restore functionality
True-ish, and Apple certainly can't chuck any bricks in that particular greenhouse. However, there are a couple of mitigating factors:
If Apple doesn't sort this out soon they're going to start hacking off developers - virtualization is so darn useful. This will come to a head when 10.5 is released and betas of 10.6 go out and developers have to juggle past, present and future major versions of the x86 based OS - but the initiative will have to come from developers, via Apple - Parallels and VMWare have no strong incentive to break a sweat over it.
P.S. Also bear in mind that the last thing Apple want is, officially or otherwise, a "try-before-you-buy" route for OSX: even if the implementation was non-flakey, the first impression of playing with a new OS is always frustration because of the differences and the fact that your instinct is to plunge into "clever stuff" rather than work through the basics. Better if you are sold on the idea by an evangelist, part with cash, and have a $2000 incentive to get over having to press the fricking pretzel key instead of "ctrl".
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
From TFA: "For its part, Microsoft says that hypervisor rootkits are a serious threat to virtualization, and they could be right."
... oooh hypervisor rootkit!!! ... won't fool any of the guys who know enough to employ virtualization.
Surely, they don't mean to suggest that hypervisor rootkits stop being a threat as soon as the user ponies up the additional $210 or so for a Vista Ultimate edition?
Come on, M$, take your time and try to come up with a better excuse than that! Saying