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?

[gstoddart]

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

I believe, though I'm not certain, that by providing these vouchers, M$ is in fact helping to support interoperablity across platforms. Or, at least, they can be seen to be trying to help this. As a side benefit, they cycle some revenue through Novell, who they currently aren't at war with.

I think this is part of the contact they entered into with Novell that everyone initially said would be used to fragment the OSS people by saying that only Novell would be unencumbered by patent claims.

That's probably oversimplified, but that's my quick take on it.

Cheers

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?

[unlametheweak]

It seems more like the dubious world of high finance and banking than anything high tech. Microsoft is buying and selling Linux vouchers? Well they could just as easily be selling Indulgences.

And BTW my eyes happened to glance at the top of Slashdot, I thought it read "Don't feed the penguins".

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[morgan_greywolf]

$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?

Well it's certainly an under-the-table something. Microsoft always hides large money transfers for underhanded deals under some other guise. It could be that, or it could be that Microsoft is trying to get SuSE to do something else that would further splinter the free and open source software communities further.

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[jellomizer]

I would suspect Microsoft is doing this to maintain control of its customer base. They get a new client they run Linux and Windows, with slim chance of them getting away from Linux. Downplaying or dissing Linux will not lead to good relations to the client. Supporting Linux isn't their cup of tea. So they sell them at reduced cost SUSE Support vouchers to their clients, so they can go to them for the Linux Problems, Microsoft Consultants while working with the client can use support which the client paid mostly for, and charge for the hour to sit there and wait for the SUSE support to come with an answer. As well being on location Microsoft makes sure that Linux doesn't creep onto its territory. Their Client is happy as they got Linux support cheap, and Microsoft is not pressing them to get off Linux. Thus having a client happy with Microsoft. Being Microsoft is there to prevent creep in one direction and the customer over time is soften up a bit. Perhaps just perhaps they may decide that they may replace the stressed out MySQL server with an MSSQL server and while MSSQL is there you may want to upgrade their intranet to Sharepoint. Or get Mono working great on their servers and get some new ASP.NET development using MS Visual Studios.

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[Dancindan84]

Linux vendors get a great deal of their revenue through support. The way I see it they're trying to direct revenue to their chosen Linux vendor, thereby hurting the other vendors. If you run a mixed MS/Linux shop and can get subsidized SUSE support through MS, it makes business sense to go that route.

They look like they're supporting Linux, but they're only doing it for the vendor that's in their back pocket.

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[Enderandrew]

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.

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[Enderandrew]

Antitrust isn't about market share so much as how well you play with others. You can be anti-competitive without a commanding market share. For instance, Intel is in hot water for demanding retailers not carry AMD products and without shipments from retailers who did. Intel doesn't have a 90% market share, but they can be held responsible for their tactics.

Conversely, the local utility company has no competition, yet they are a legal monopoly. In some states, these "natural" monopolies are regulated.

Microsoft can have a 93% OS market share, and get a pass if they behave well and play nicely with the other kids in the sandbox. Interoperability is precisely what the EU called for.

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?

[Ilgaz]

If you look/remember MS Halloween documents which are verified to be true, you will notice they figured out the weak spot of community: Easy to divide.

So, each person boycotting Novell for a very good reason or doesn't use Gnome because of Icaza is a win for Microsoft. $100M is nothing for them, absolutely nothing.

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[JohnBailey]

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.

They tried to offer the same deal to Red Hat more than once I think. But while Red Hat was quite happy to offer to work work with them on interoperability as much as they liked, they refused to enter into any cross patent protection deal like Novell. So no "You open source commies are stealing our IP" deal was possible.

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[G00F]

"MS$ has never been at war with Novell. MS$ has always been at war with IBM...."

That is so not true. Here lay NetWare and Word Perfect, May they rest in peace. And not to forget poor DR-DOS.

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[Enderandrew]

Microsoft isn't providing the support. Novell provides the support. Microsoft is reselling Novell support.

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[HitoGuy]

True, but I remain persistently suspicious. Microsoft has been known to pretend to be playing nice, but I've seen too many of Microsoft's "partners" get run over by Microsoft for me to believe that Microsoft is actually genuinely looking out for any interests beyond their own.

I would NOT be surprised if I would see Microsoft do something to ultimately bury Novell. When I read the Halloween Documents for myself, I find it odd Microsoft would be any more genuine about supporting Linux than they were about OS/2 when they were doing the initial NT development.

Don't forget also the means of which Microsoft got this "deal" with Novell: Threatening everyone with patent litigation over 235 patents. No, sir, I think Microsoft isn't suddenly playing nice. Pretending, certainly, but actually doing it? No.

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?

[mls]

Microsoft needs Silverlight penetration in order to compete with Flash. Windows is not where MS makes their money, software and tools like Office and Visual Studio is where they make money. Not to mention their want to compete with Google for ad revenue.

Silverlight gives them the ability to deploy rich web versions of Office for a subscription.
Silverlight gives them the ability to compete and control some of the advertisement market.
Silverlight helps them sell servers and Visual Studio.
Silverlight helps them gain more .NET developers, as well as allowing .NET developers access to newer platforms with the skills and software they already own.
Silverlight helps them maintain control over Internet technologies, or at least stops some of their loss of control.

As far as Microsoft doing this because Adobe changed their policy, I think the opposite is true. Adobe changed their policy as a stop-loss against Silverlight and XPS. Adobe needs to maintain their market share in light of their new competition from Microsoft.

Re:Can anyone clarify?

[HitoGuy]

That and Red Hat seems to be a bit smarter than Novell. They knew despite public perception of Novell getting gobs of $$$ from Microsoft in their cross-patent deal, they'd lose in the long term.

It's the lesson of $5 now vs. $10 in a year, except Microsoft isn't offering the $10 in a year, only more threats.

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

Why?

[ShieldW0lf]

Why would you buy Linux support from MS? You would think you'd get better support buying it from, oh, a lemonade stand perhaps?

Re:Why?

[Giometrix]

Why would you buy Linux support from MS? You would think you'd get better support buying it from, oh, a lemonade stand perhaps?

Because Microsoft is know for excellent support?

Re:Why?

[SlipperHat]

Why would you buy Linux support from MS? You would think you'd get better support buying it from, oh, a lemonade stand perhaps?

Because Microsoft is know for excellent support?

No, because Microsoft is known for its high quality lemons.

Re:i dont know

[moderatorrater]

All of the places that I've worked have been mixed Windows/Linux server environments, with some of the servers being Windows to take care of Outlook stuff and the web servers and database servers running linux. If you've got a smaller shop with just a few servers, and you want support, Microsoft is now able to provide you with a complete solution. If you're a tinfoil wearer, you can go ahead and assume that they're going to use this to push their clients towards windows exclusivity over the next few years as well. If you're naive and don't study history, you can assume that they're doing this because they want to be 100% interoperable, and this is the first step. If you live in the real world with me, you can assume that a little of both is true - interoperability is a goal for them, and they would also like to be in a position to nudge you closer to windows.

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