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Microsoft To Buy $100M More SUSE Support Vouchers
CWmike writes "Microsoft will buy and resell up to another $100 million worth of enterprise support subscriptions for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Two years ago, Microsoft agreed to buy and resell $240 million worth of the vouchers. Susan Hauser, general manager of strategic partnerships and licensing at Microsoft, confirmed that some of the subscription vouchers were sold to customers for less than face value, though none were given away for free."
I really have no idea what this means, or why it is news.
Why would you buy Linux support from MS? You would think you'd get better support buying it from, oh, a lemonade stand perhaps?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
It's a conspiracy!!! Novell is evil and is in league with Microsoft and Men In Black. They want to take over the Earth for the aliens and satan, and Microsoft selling SuSE support is the first step! Quick we need to make some tin foil hats!
if Id want to buy Linux support from MS. I assume since they're vouchers, its still novell tech support, but still, I just dont get it ...
Maybe i should have read the article.
Microsoft is reselling Novell support.
He said nothing whatsoever about MS's customer support for MS products, which your anecdote is about.
He suggested that MS would not be a good provider of Linux support. Similarly, I am sure he would not buy support for MS Windows from Red Hat.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
See, you could have presented all of that information in a polite manner, and in all probability you would have been modded informative for it.
*sigh*
Well, in any case, it seems that there is a huge difference between the Indians that work for the consumer support division and the ones that work for the commercial/server side of things. That is probably not anything out of the ordinary; probably you're really comparing apples and oranges there.
The question should be whether MS server support is better than (e.g.) Red Hat server support. On the consumer side of things, Microsoft does as little customer support as possible; I've never had the opportunity to find out whether they're any good or not. My guess is that they're in a race to the bottom of the barrel with a few of the major computer manufacturers and Verizon DSL tech support.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
....Bill and Melinda Gates foundation sponsored Ringtone
Like geeks really need this...
This has to be the dumbest idea in the history of business .. insert car analogy here ...
davecb5620@gmail.com
Those Indians they outsource to are on top of it.
They sure are.
My blog
How is this helping MS investors again?
There do seem some subtle effects on SUSE, though. If you install version 11.0 on a machine which has Windows pre-installed (because you couldn't buy the Laptop without the Microsoft tax), it no longer gives yo a pref=configured option to remove the Windows. The only way, it seems, to remove Windows now is to go through a manual partitioning process which may be a bit daunting for the average home user. In versions prior to the Microsoft partnership, there was a convenient option to do a clean install removing all existing partitions including an MS partition. Fritz
The fix for this is called DBAN.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I might have missed something, but I didn't see anything that said MS paid face value, so how do you know that MS actually paid $100M or that it's selling them at a loss? As long as Novell didn't have the customers already locked up, why wouldn't Novell be willing to wholesale at some discount? And how often does Novell give discounts directly to the customers anyway? I'd bet it's pretty common.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. (Ambrose Bierce)
Whoosh...
For example, Novells replacement for Zenworks 7 uses mono/dotnet extensively. Zenworks 10 is the biggest pile of horse manure since i dont know what. On the client side its slow as a dog, doesnt add anything you cant already do with Microsoft offering and bugs out like nothing i have ever seen. The server side is just as messy and truly suck. Compared to its predecessor its quite a step down and not in any way an upgrade. I highly suspect using mono was a corporate decision not in any way connected to what developers or product managers wanted.
Mono evolves in snail pace and moonlight doesn't work but is used by Microsoft extensively to showcase Silverlights "cross platform" support. Mono doesn't bring anything to the Novell customer at all, its just about PR to MS.
The sad thing is Novell was uniquely positioned to stand as the only NOS that could bring disperse networks with Mac, Linux and Windows computers together in a easy managed setup. This is now thrown out the window and most work they do seems to be slaughtering Groupwise, Zenworks, NSS, NCP and NDPS leaving Novell nothing more than a company selling a few tools to manage Windows networks the Microsoft way and a pretty crappy Linux distribution.
Unless they quickly come to some sense Novell will be history as soon as the money from Microsoft stops flowing. At first i thought Novell would atleast try to outsmart Microsoft but looking at what they offer their customers that cant be the case.
1. Buy lots of services from competing companies.
2. Resell said services.
3. ???????
4. I don't know, but it can't be "Profit!"
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
This time line is just too strange.
Back in the day. Novell made a lot of money with Netware which was completely dependent on Windows. They get back-doored by Microsoft and flounder for a while.
Then they buy one of the top three Linux distributions and with out hesitation, they get in line for another anal-raping.
Novell just loves being Microsoft's biotch.
Boycott Novell has good information about this slimy deal.
Here's Bruce Perens' 2002 perspective. All of this was planned in advance. It is put together very well by a poster named LARS:
Novell is a traitor to software freedom and things will not end well for them.
Here is another way the deal is bad for everyone, spreading disinformation as if it came from the free software community or commercial Linux vendors.
The end game is to own free software. The original deal was so transparently bad that even sleeping antitrust courts will notice. We should imagine the second bribe is on equally crazy terms. Look at how they are trying to cover the bills and you see what they would like to have as a future business model when people realize that Windows provides no value. Yep, they openly call the coupons "royalty payments." That kind of language makes the GP look nice.
And SCO would have been so much better...
<twitter> They also identify my accounts on the first few posts.
They got my GNUChop today and replied to it by cut and
pasting a brlug comment.
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/08/16/irc-log-15082008-2/#tAug%2015%2023:24:46
Eastasia. MS has always been at war with Eastasia.
...to pay your $699 licensing fee you cock smoking twitter!
Not very bright, are we.
For some reason I have never liked Novell/Suse there is something bad (like Caldera) about them.
Even veals have more autonomy!
Now Microsoft support does not need to deal with Vista.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
n/t
It was probably the blog post praising Groklaw featured here on Slashdot and a general lack of sleep, but I read this story's title as "Microsoft to Buy $100M More SCO Support Vouchers".
Eh, I'll blame China, the IOC, and NBC for not running the Olympics at a time slot that's further away from midnight.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
How do I know you are not both IRC twitter and gnuchop? You are either scanning the entire net for twitter activity or you are falsifying it. Pathetic, either way isn't it?
I don't know whether it is that,or they are just sticking the Linux boxes in the corner. They tell the CIO "Linux? Sure it is good for email servers,since email is full of spam and malware nowadays,or for a file server that you want access to on the DMZ without authentication,but do you really want to give up the ease of use that is your AD domain? We would be happy to set up Linux servers to do email and file serving FOR you,and we'll do it all at a lower initial cost and with a lower TCO. What do you say?"
I agree that it is simply good business to offer a full solution like that. And let us not forget that while there are plenty of Windows admins,Linux admins are harder to find and more expensive to boot. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if in a year or two they don't just take the plunge and buy one of the smaller distros that works well with Windows Server(My money would be on Xandros. They could get it cheap and with the API deal their server product works wonderfully in an AD domain. It also rips off the Win MMC for the interface,so no retraining required.) and offer it as "An integrated end to end solution that minimizes risks thanks to a non homogeneous environment and maximizes both customer satisfaction and server uptime." But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
Why do they need to compete by selling a linux-based windows-clone, when any sale of windows for more than 0$ makes profit?
Well, it's notorious. It's like Novell is the open source company of MS.
This is why I recommend all of my business associates, friends, family, and everyone with a heartbeat to check out Boycottnovell.com. This guy Roy is fighting the good fight, informing others about Microsoft, Novell, and the criminal element which continues today in corporate America and beyond as most of the public cuddles their xbox and continues to send money to Redmond.
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/08/20/microsoft-suse-coupons/
I'm in Africa you shrew!
I don't really understand the point of using a MS Backed Linux/Mono/Moonlight myself. Why not choose the original? Aka Windows?
UNIX may be greener. In many cases you require far fewer servers to provide the same level of service, even if you can virtualize the Windows environment, and for data centers where power is the main cost (and increasing number of them) that adds up fast.
In case you had any doubts as to his thinking..
âoePeople that use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us.â
â"Steve Ballmer
âoeWe believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability.â
â"Steve Ballmer
âoeThereâ(TM)s no company called Linux, thereâ(TM)s barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, itâ(TM)s free.â
â"Steve Ballmer
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
It's gonna be hard to use this sock now, twitter.
retard