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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."
This is clearly Microsoft suffering a managerial battle of the wills. One half wants to bow down to pressure to reverse the EULA ban on virtulization, while the other half is strong opposed to relenting.
I suspect (hope) that desperation with the lack of popularity of Vista will force Microsoft's hand.
but could this just be Microsoft trying to squeeze yet more dollars of profit out of everything they can (i.e. now virtulization)?
I think therefore I am... a Linux geek.
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
This was already mentioned yesterday: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/20/064324 1
"A deadlock has been reached. One task must die. We must now choose between murder and suicide."
"Something else must be going on here". No shit sherlock.
The thing that's going on is market segmentation. 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. It's the exact same principle as is used for pricing some commercial databases according to "number of CPUs in the system which is going to be running it" - anyone who's got the money to buy and the need to run a 16-processor system can probably afford to spend more on the database, regardless of whether there's any technical difference between the 16 processor version and the 8 processor version of the software.
For games, maybe?
The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before. - Neil Gaiman
It seems that the only thing you can do on Ubuntu that you can't do on windows is troll slashdot...
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Yes, but most games don't actually run well under virtualization. Or Wine for that matter.
There are however some AWESOME Linux native games:
Zsnes (every super nintendo game)
Mupen (every Nintendo 64 game)
Urban Terror (Linux Native!)
Other than those all I really miss is Grand theft Auto, which doesn't run well in virtualization anyway, and Civilization 2, which also doesn't run great virtualized, and further, is pretty damned old these days, though still more playable than civ 3 or 4.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
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? =>
Microsoft gives you at least a (costly) option. Apple (correct me, if I'm wrong) doesn't.
And no, I am not a MS fanboy. I've been using Linux for more then ten years almost exclusively. Lack of hassle with licensing issues being one of the reasons for my choice of OS.
Your post would be valid if Microsoft actually gave free technical support with their OSes. However, this is not the case - usually a for-fee trouble ticket is required for anything beyond activation key issues.
You are changing the EULA of your latest product. cancel or allow? :-)
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
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
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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
Not even the Ultimate License allows you to watch/play DRMd content in a virtual machine. It is impossible to technically restrict what can be done with content as soon as it is played in a Virtual Machine. Audio is especially easy to make perfect digital copies of, even if it is DRMd.
Allowing home editions of Vista to be run in Virtual Machines would essentially make the DRM protection in Vista useless.
So leave Gates and Co alone. I don't want them to allow virtualization. It will make my job a whole lot easier.
Too lazy to create a sig...
Which, (assuming sarcasm on your part), wouldn't rule out the virtualisation restrictions being a contributory factory in to poor vista sales.
Certainly. However, I think it's safe to assume - as my sarcasm intended - that EULA-limited virtualisation is only something a tiny minority of users would take into account.
(Especially since a quite reasonable interpretation of the EULA doesn't prevent you from, say, virtualising a copy of Vista on your Mac running OS X - ie: the most common end-user virtualisation scenario.)
I think we can take the poor sales as a given - if vista was flying off the shelves, MS wouldn't trouble with a "fact rich" campaign to persuade potential customers to "proceed with confidence". Whether or not sales is the same thing as popularity is another question, although Microsoft fans don't usually have a problem with the notion when contrasting Windows against Linux.
As with Office, Microsoft's biggest competitor to Vista is Windows XP. Vista sales are slow not because it is "bad", but because XP is well and truly "good enough". Hence, the take-up rate of Vista is basically that of new/replacement PC sales.
But let's not get sidetracked. Even if virtualisation isn't causing Vista's sales problems, it could still be seen as doing so, internally. For that matter, if MS were going to relent a little on the more controversial features of Vista, they're more likely to give ground over virtualisation than they are to back pedal over DRM, for example. And there's probably nothing they can do at this late stage about the hardware issues. So if they were inclined to throw the potential buyer a bone, it would pretty much have to be over virtualisation.
Not really much of a bone. The proportion of customers such an annoucement would sway is miniscule by any reasonable argument. I don't think even the craziest of sales droids believe that a meaningful (hell, even statistically valid) portion of their userbase is holding back because of perceived problems with virtualising certain versions of Vista.