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Ballmer: Don't Expect Simpler Licensing Soon
nk497 writes "Steve Ballmer has admitted Microsoft's licensing is too complicated and contains too much fine print, but has no plans to change it at the risk of angering shareholders — and even customers who benefit from the confusion. "I'm sure we have fine print we don't need. We're not saints," he said, adding that customers have a way of figuring out how to pay the least amount of cash possible to use Microsoft's software. "Customers always find an approach which pays us less money.""
We take advantage of MSDN, it's MUCH cheaper to pay for MSDN subscriptions for our technical staff then it is to pay for ~2/3rd's of our environment (Dev+Test). It's also nice to use Windows Datacenter licenses to pay for an entire stack of VM's.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
customers have a way of figuring out how to pay the least amount of cash possible to use Microsoft's software
Yes. It's "Format C:" followed by installing some flavor of Linux and Open Office.
buy it and you're fucked.
"Customers always find an approach which pays us less money.""
Other than piracy, switching to Mac or Linux I don't know what he means? Sounds like sour grapes. I guess he feels his paycheck should be bigger. It's a wallet not a phallic symbol.
I'll give you a hint, their customers are not the admins who actually have to comprehend and create policy/procedure to abide by License terms. They have two primary customers.
1. The retail consumer who doesn't read EULA's and willfully violates them.
2. The purchasing manager/executive class.
Sysadmins aren't on that list.
Moreover, Mr. Ballmer is giving the implicit nod to violate the terms of the license agreements. Guess who loses on that deal? The sysadmin!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
It looks like most of the article takes small quotes from Ballmer and presumably paraphrases the rest. There aren't a whole lot of quotes form Ballmer himself. And the slashdot summary is even worse. Firstly, he appears to be referring to companies with this quote, not end user customer type peoples (emphasis mine):
But he claimed that the finer details of the licensing system give some companies the opportunity to save money. "Customers always find an approach which pays us less money," he claimed.
Here are some of the *other* quotes from the article that the summary left out.
"Every time you simplify something, you lose something that people used to save money," he added, suggesting that even minor changes to the system could hurt some of its customers.
"The goal is to simplify without a price increase," Ballmer said, adding: "Our shareholders want simplicity without a price decrease."
He added that customers donâ(TM)t want simplicity for the sake of it, claiming that the last time Microsoft tried that route, customer ratings of the firm "plummeted for two years."
Ballmer seems to also be noting that shareholders and customers want two different things: shareholders want Microsoft to charge more and do it more simply, and customers want Microsoft to charge less and do it more simply. Everyone wants it simpler, but simpler+price-decrease and simpler+price-increase are two different things. But don't read what he really said. Just assume he means the worst and let's pretend that one of the largest (the largest?) software companies has a complete idiot in charge and that EVERYONE knows he is an idiot but they keep him there anyway. Or something like that?
If they didn't grossly overcharge for the product, most people would have no complaints. When you charge $200 for an OS when $50 or $60 is the amount people are happy to pay, you don't have complaints about pricing.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
No shit. When was the last time Microsoft did something the customers wanted, instead of forcing them to "take it or leave it". When was the last time any Office application didn't brake file compatibility with previous versions. When was the last time you felt like you actually own a Microsoft software product, and don't have to rent it AND justify yourself every time you need to install it on a new computer? Last time some Microsoft protocol didn't break compatibility with competing, or even older own protocols? I don't know, it feels like forever.
Licensing issues are really just the tip of the iceberg of this Satan's spawn called Microsoft.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I said this once before and am still convinced. All this self-inflicted damage is a secret plan to have Bill Gates make a comeback, just like Steve Jobs, and "save" Microsoft. If Bill isn't initially included in this plan of theirs, Ballmer is certainly ensuring that Gates loses enough of his stock gains to force him to come back and work again. Between the goofy ad campaigns and Ballmer's "Microsoft DOES suck" speeches, why wouldn't Microsoft begin to crumble. From the inside.
He added that customers don't want simplicity for the sake of it, claiming that the last time Microsoft tried that route, customer ratings of the firm "plummeted" for two years."
Unless Microsoft sees its product as being licenses rather than software (which is entirely possible, now I think of it) this is daft. People have to interact with the software on a daily basis. They only care about licenses when they get in their way... which is more likely to happen if they don't know what they're buying.
"Customers always find an approach which pays us less money."
That's okay Steve, Microsoft always finds a way to make clunky, insecure software: There is balance in the Microsoft universe.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
As a past employee of a Retail store, I know for a fact that they always find a way to make customers pay much more then is necessary for everything they can, up to and including OS's. I don't know how many people were sold on "Media Center" functionality they never used and that's just scratching the surface. As for the Obligatory Open Source comment, our licensing is much more simple. http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/licensing
It's remarkable really. Even MS support can't tell you consistently what you actually need to be legal for a given situation. Call three times with the same scenario and get three different answers.
Talk about business risks, you're just begging to have the BSA commandos sweep in and decide that whatever you guessed (or what MS told you to do) isn't correct and you are now a dirty thief who owes a pile of cash. No, thanks!
If they're going to get all bent out of shape about license compliance, the onus is on them to make it possible to know with certainty what you must do (and spend) in order to be compliant. Given that their own support people aren't sure, I'd say they failed miserably.
Rule 1: You are out of compliance.
Rule 2; If you have reviewed your licenses and purchased additional licenses to cover any license shortages (plus additional licenses just to be safe), See rule #1.
Rule 3: If you think you understand Microsoft license agreemenents, you are either delirious or just not paying attention.
Rule 4: If you are a lawyer for Microsoft in charge of writing license agreements, see rule #3.
Rule 5: See rule #1.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Same here, until my last computer - that is.
Prebuilt consumer computers are really crappy. Take my latest HP Pavillion Quad Core as an example, after 1 month, the keyboard stopped working, after 3 months the wireless module went to wifi-heaven where little wifi things go (All wifi's goes to heaven, the movie), and after the 5th month, the DVD stopped accepting pretty much any DVD & games even though there where no dust. I'm just waiting for the next thing to break for no reason. At work it's the same thing, the pre-built one breaks down, not the ones I built - they still stand!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Part of the reason that several of my past companies/clients drifted away from Microsoft was due to the incredibly complex licensing. You can do XYZ for this price, but only if you have up to N seats. After N+1 seats, you pay using an entirely new cost schedule (could be higher...could be lower)....etc. It got to the point where our "Microsoft sales rep" literally had to periodically visit us and attempt to explain how we could do a project with their tools while not running afoul of some obscure CAL fee that nobody even knew about. Combine that with the never ending upgrade merry-go-round and it is easy to see why companies just throw up their hands and look for a way out.
Just like any other business or government body, the lowest bidder gets the contract. When the P4 came out, Dell stopped making good quality PC's and focused more on low bidder parts fulfillment.
Being a spelling & grammar Nazi is a sign you do not poses the intelligence to contribute to the conversation
"We're not saints." -- Steve Ballmer
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Bing = Bing Is Not Google!!!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
"Customers always find an approach which pays us less money." If that were true, wouldn't all of Microsoft's customers already be using Linux? (They still use Microsoft because they believe the costs of rewriting applications and retraining users exceed the cost of licensing the latest releases from Redmond.) I'm not even sure that customers even do a decent job of calculating Total Cost of Ownership, since they frequently neglect the potential cost of security holes, as well as the cost of not saving copies of all your licenses and then getting a visit from the BSA.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Stockholders tend to not care about 10 years down the road. They want their money now. If you are in MS shoes and you are being pressured to return to prior levels of financial growth despite being squeezed by Apple, Google, Linux etc., then the easy way out is to squeeze more licensing fees out of existing customers who's tool stack is based around MS products. They almost *have to* pay. The downside is that resentment is building which will start to bite back down the road. They ran out of logs and are now burning strips of cabin.
Table-ized A.I.
Ditto here, from experience. My home brews just keep on going, and going, and going, while the pretty store bought machines that the wife likes fall apart. I don't buy the most expensive, highest quality parts either - just good, solid items with good reviews. The wife finally took a stab at her own home brew machine, without asking my advice. The result was only very slightly better than a store bought, because she didn't know which numbers to look at, and didn't take the customer reviews into account. Ehhh - she's learns slowly, but I think she's finally convinced that she should ask my advice next time around.
Step one: google for overclocking forums, visit them, and see what all the super nerds are using for mainboards. Choose popular mainboard that you can afford, then choose the fastest CPU you can afford for that architecture. Load it with memory, and proceed from there. Together, we've been burnt by a cheap mainboard more times than all other components combined. The uber-geeks have those boards figured out two days after the prototype hits the news! Using any of their top 10 favorites guarantees a good solid machine that will last a long, long time.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
but has no plans to change it at the risk of angering shareholders
Customers, Steve. Its all about the customers. Shareholders come and go, but customers need attention.
Take a lesson from Detroit. Build crap and your market share evaporates. Turn things around, start building quality and it will still take a generation to get those customers back. Sure, Detroit didn't have proprietary format lock in working for them. But customers are getting educated about that. Even if MS switches to all open formats, the memory of the old days will keep customers scared away for years to come once they've left.
Have gnu, will travel.
Comments similar to yours from our competitors bring nothing but cheer to my heart. Fortunately for our shop, Free software meets our needs practically from top to bottom. Not only does it meet our needs but it exceeds them in ways Microsoft can't. Not just in pricing but in functionality and flexibility. The interesting thing is, most or our competitors' infrastructures could be ran similarly but through a combination of sheer ignorance and the inability to ween themselves from the MS teet, they continue to needlessly spend millions on restrictive licenses while we invest the same money in things that actually add to the bottom line and help us grow. Consequently, in the recent economic downturn, we've thrived while some people I used to know in this business have just flat out gone under.
Not saying that Free software is for everybody because it isn't. You must have actual competent IT staff to wring the every last bit of value of it. A crew of MCSE's aren't going to cut it. We, with the help of a certain hire several years ago, saw the light and changed from being a complete MS shop over to Free software with very little problems. And it either meets your needs or not. But I'd be willing to bet that just about any outfit has some slack and could stand to save a few bucks on licenses somewhere.
Ballmer does appear to be an idiot. Under his watch, we've seen the Xbox with its expensive warranty, the lovely Zune, Office 2007, and Vista. I consider these failures that I'm not certain would have occurred if Gates was still in charge. Okay, I'm sure at least Vista made a boat-load of money and therefore can't be classified as a failure as far as the markets are concerned, but that's only because of their market position. Ballmer won't be able to get this free ride forever as other alternatives slowly gain traction in the market.
From what I've seen, Ballmer tries really hard, but he's just not that great of a CEO. Just my opinion.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
The only customers of a publicly traded company are the shareholders. The consumers are a natural resource to exploit.
When I went to school, I told them I didn't want to do Windows, but wanted to learn Unix admin. They said it was "much to complicated for a novice" and I "had to learn Windows first to understand the basics". Translation: they didn't have a Unix curriculum.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Ditto here, from experience. My home brews just keep on going, and going, and going, while the pretty store bought machines that the wife likes fall apart.
They definitely can, but don't necessarily. I've had my share of dead components in homebrew machines over the years, that's for sure, and from reputable manufs. I've had ASUS and Intel boards just conk out. Not often, not all the time, but it happens, and it's no less annoying then, either.
Mmmm - yes, you make a point. But, I'm not certain that we understand each other's points, fully. Yes, Asus is a reputable mainboard company. One of the best boards I've ever owned is an Asus. It's already 7 years old, I've upgraded the BIOS twice, added peripherals that weren't supported when it was new - it's a great board. BUT - the wife's semi-successful homebrew is based on an Asus K8N board. It isn't as high quality as my SK8V, it was built for the abandoned socket 754, and most importantly, you won't find it in any overclocker's forum archives as an overclocker's dream. (In fact, it is marginally over clockable, but onboard video and the CPU both suffer from heat stress, and freeze up with a stock GPU and CPU coolers in place.)
So, I stress, don't rely as much on brand name, as the reviews in the over clocker's forums. If Mad Gamer posts about the outstanding stability of Asus model XXxX when overclocked at 5 Ghz, buy it. The wildly overclocked board that lasts him 6 months to 1 year will probably last for ten years in more normal service.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Stop over charging for your software, and perhaps more people would buy it instead of pirating it.
They should keep overcharging to encourage their customers to look for cheaper and better alternatives.
They have no intention of making it more simple. Case in point: I often see computers come in for repair that need a reinstallation. Where this is the case, we go ahead and reinstall from a disk we hold here providing there is a valid certificate of authenticity on the case or the customer can provide one. Recently, Microsoft stopped allowing the validation of that. The disk we were installing from would still accept the certificate of authenticity number on the side of the case, but then failed to activate. Microsoft's explanation for this is that you can no longer reinstall windows from ANY disk except the one originally supplied with the machine (convenient for Microsoft if, like many computers these days, it didn't actually come with physical disks but instead allowed the user to create "rescue disks" if they could figure out how) and that if you no longer have or never were provided with the original disk that came with the machine, then you have to buy a completely new license from scratch. This is a complete rip-off. If someone has a genuinely installed Windows, then they have bought the license to use one copy on one machine at any one time. This means they should be allowed to reload that one copy from any source should they suffer a machine crash, and should not be tied exclusively to the actual physical disk that may or may not have been supplied with the machine. The real reason MS licensing is so complicated is so that MS can move the goalposts whenever they see an opportunity to make money. The reason it's so complicated is to hide every new initiative to rip off their customers.
"Customers always find an approach which pays us less money."
You will always lose a small percentage of sales to piracy, no matter what your software is. However, somebody needs to realize that if
a) people pirate your software more than average, or
b) people are looking to use loopholes to pay less, or
c) people switch to other software,
then any (or in this case, all) of the following are true:
1) your software is bloated crap, and you need to fire designers/coders
2) it's not worth the amount you're asking, and you need to fire marketing
3) There are too many bloody versions for joe schmoe to keep track of, (and marketing should still get the shaft)
4) your competitors have a cheaper and/or better product (in which case you do like MS and spread fud about the competition)
5) you need to develop a modern business model other than a price-gouging ~85% monopoly.(which involves the painful process of removing your head from your ass)
'Nuff said.
Evolution - Est. 4500000000 B.C. Don't piss in the gene pool.