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."

Comments

Can anyone clarify?

[yincrash]

I really have no idea what this means, or why it is news.

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[mls]

$100MM seems like a lot, but is this an under the table way to fund Moonlight (Mono version of Silverlight) to help them gain traction on Flash?

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[gbjbaanb]

I suppose $100m will pay some Mono developers' salaries for a while longer, though I reckon if they wanted to really support Linux interoperability and suchlike, they'd have bought RedHat vouchers instead/as well.

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[Ilgaz]

Does anyone actually believe that Microsoft will fund anything which will provide exact or better experience than the same thing on Windows?

Why would people use Windows than? Why does MS create Silverlight at first place absolutely knowing industry will laugh at them? They were so bugged by Adobe changing policy and shipping Flash to all big three platforms at same time. A person enjoying Youtube on Linux is the Microsoft's worst nightmare. It shouldn't work!

Also Flash is way more than Youtube, you can even ship a full feature media player on 3 different platforms just by some Flash/Flex/Air stuff. E.g. Adobe Media Player.

The "Flash Lite 3" plans to ship it for free to multiple handheld platforms must be particularly alerting for MS.

If MS really wanted to race with Flash as a "new option", not "another opportunity to lock people to windows". I tell you what would happen. SilverlightInstaller.i386.rpm _and_ 64bit version (bit to bit, PERFECTLY same as windows) would be available from Microsoft site itself. Man, _that_ would raise alarm at Adobe.

Also, lets not forget Adobe makes money from the Flash creation tools and servers etc. so a future open source flash minus (patented and binary) codecs is not impossible thing. I am speaking about that kind of thing: https://www.helixcommunity.org/ , what would be the meaning of monkeying with open source code to replicate a microsoft technology knowing you will never achieve windows version?

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[marcosdumay]

Well, if their Linux support is anything like their Windows support, they won't stay on the market for long.

But if that is really their intent, I applaud them for using legitimate business tactic too.

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[JamesP]

But the main question is: Why go MS + (subsidized NOVL) rather than going 100% Linux (w/ paid support)

Granted, these are not regular Windows shops, but usually have extra specialized support from MS

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[hairyfeet]

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

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[hairyfeet]

Well as someone who has used both Xandros server and desktop,and even managed to sell a couple of servers running Xandros to a couple of SMBs,I can say that without a doubt Xandros is the easiest Linux distro I have ever used as far as playing nice in a Windows SMB. And the Xandros XMC is damned near identical to the Winserver MMC,which made showing their admins the ropes butt simple. It will run as a controller or member server in an AD forest,Scalix makes a nice MS Exchange replacement,complete with calendaring and group workspaces,and the built in Xen makes for easy virtualization,plus it already has the hooks for VMWare if you want to go that route.

If you need to switch over a Windows domain into a mixed environment or even completely over to Linux,Xandros seriously cuts down on retraining. To show the SMBs how easy it was I simply had them point out the most clueless user they had and had them use my Xandros laptop to do their work. In both cases the secretaries immediately went to work without a bit of trouble. Both fired up MS Office 2K after logging on to the domain and just kept on chugging. The only question I got was "Can you make a shortcut to the email on the desktop?" and once I gave them that they were good to go. The best part is Xandros has a "make it act like XP" button which when called will make all the keyboard shortcuts and context menus behave like WinXP,so if the user can run Windows he/she can run Xandros. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[rktechhead]

It is called hedging your bets and cutting your losses.

Let's say I'm a CIO who is considering putting Linux in my shop and dropping Microsoft. I'm a little scared, but I want to take the plunge.

Microsoft comes in, and says "we'll work with you. We'll see you commercial support for Linux, and push you in the direction of a Linux distro aimed at interoperability with Microsoft products."

Instead of Microsoft losing money completely, they make up the loss of Microsoft licenses with profits from support contracts, and convince the CIO to not drop Microsoft completely, but rather mix Linux and Microsoft products. They keep a close relationship with the CIO, and establish goodwill in the hopes the CIO will return completely to the Microsoft fold.

All the while they earn interoperability brownie points with the EU.

Is this evil? No. It is in fact really smart business and I applaud them following legitimate smart business tactics as opposed to some of their old ones.

I agree that it's just smart business. Microsoft is well aware that they need to have a shift in business model in order to survive as we've turned into a new century.

As much as I dislike Microsoft I must admit this was a good move on the business side.

I don't think that this is some deep seeded plot to destroy Linux from the inside. Microsoft probably gave up on doing that years ago, and you know how the saying goes "You can't beat them, jo- sell mediocre support for them for a nice profit"

Re:Microsoft to sell SUSE Support Vouchers ..

[Penguinisto]

insert car analogy here ...

Ford giving you a discount on your next Chevy (and service on the thing while you own it, too!)

Dunno what would be more incredulous - selling the scheme with a straight face, or actually buying into it with one.

(hey, you asked...)

/P

Subtle effects on SUSE

[FritzSolms]

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