How Many SUSE Subscriptions Can You Get For $240M?

itwbennett writes "According to an SD Times article, Microsoft is almost through passing out the infamous subscription certificates for SUSE Enterprise Linux that it purchased for $240 million as part of its investment in Novell. According to the article, Microsoft says that 'a total of 475 customers have used an unspecified number of coupons.' Blogger Brian Proffitt calculates that 'if indeed just 475 customers have received these coupons, then Microsoft has essentially subsidized SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) deployments to an average tune of US$505,263.16 per customer.'"

Comments

Microsoft hounds

[Yvanhoe]

Microsoft has a special hounds training program. They train them to smell a very subtle scent that exist only when wealth and stupidity is mixed. They call this program "marketing". Open source sellers have moral qualms about it and prefer to solve stupidity which they see as a core problem. Guess who is making money ?

Now the important question : am I trollish, insighful, funny or CowboyNeal ?

Re:Microsoft hounds

[Monkeedude1212]

You know, It's funny how often those 4 coincide...

Re:Microsoft hounds

[jedidiah]

> People have "moral qualms" against marketing?

Yes. Little things like lying and fraud bother some people.

Re:Microsoft hounds

[notque]

Marketing was created as a systematic way of lying to people. Marketing not only shows a contempt for Democracy (Marketing for candidates), but contempt for Markets (which are supposed to work with "perfect information", the very thing marketing avoids.)

Re:Microsoft hounds

[Red Flayer]

So only on Slashdot does all marketing become "lying and fraud". Really? Did you just run out and buy the biggest broadest paint brush you can find? What do you do for a living? How do people know about it? Do you work with Marking people? Are they lyers and fradusters? Would you have the guts to say that to their face?\

You're being very antagonistic (fine, some of what the other poster(s) have written are BS).

But let me help explain why there is a huge anti-marketing sentiment amongst a large subset of the readers of slashdot.

1. Slashdot readers tend to be very analytical. We like to get all the facts and make a decision based on those facts. Marketing often obscures the facts by which we could make informed decisions.

2. A lot of us work in product development (typically software, but not always). We see marketing staff pulling in 2-3 times what we make (or more) while not actually producing anything of value (according to how we ascribe value). We see marketing staff get promoted while seeing them goof off most of the day. Some of it may be sour grapes, some of it may be jealousy, some of it may just be a lack of respect for people who don't seem to work hard -- but in any case, it's hard for the typical slashdotter to accord respect to someone who produces nothing.

3. Some of us have been burnt, professionally, by marketing people. Deliverables are marketed that have no hope of being implemented, etc.

4. Most slashdotters feel that their work stands for itself. Most people in marketing self-promote; this runs contrary to the values of most nerds. It's frustrating to see a marketing person take the credit (and the accolades) when a lot of hard work was done by the development teams.

Maybe you just need to accept the fact that some people hate the idea of marketing. Getting bent out of shape about it isn't going to do you any good.

Re:Microsoft hounds

[CrimsonAvenger]

1. Slashdot readers tend to be very analytical. We like to get all the facts and make a decision based on those facts. Marketing often obscures the facts by which we could make informed decisions.

Well, as long as the facts agree with their preconceptions, anyway.

From all I've seen over the years, /. readers are as likely to ignore inconvenient facts as any other demographic out there.

Re:Microsoft hounds

[Anonymusing]

As someone who has worked in marketing, technology, and product development... I'd say you summed up the situation pretty well. On a forum for marketing pros, you could reverse most of your points and get a decent picture of how marketing folks view programmers and product devs.

I think the key problem is noted in your #2: "We see marketing staff pulling in 2-3 times what we make (or more) while not actually producing anything of value (according to how we ascribe value)." Everybody has different opinions of value. But it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Which came first, the product, or the demand for the product? A marketer is supposed to deliver demand for a product; a good marketer will do it on a phenomenal level, and possibly even without resorting to deceptive tactics. But, without the product, there is nothing for the marketer to do. They need each other.

Should marketers make 2x or 3x the pay? Depends. A senior, proven marketer should make 3x more than a middling developer. But a senior, proven engineer should have some kind of parity. Also, marketing is inherently riskier: if you fail to produce demand and therefore sales, you're likely to lose the account, if not your job. But engineers, in my experience, tend to be more insulated from sales ebbs. (emphasis on "tend")

Re:Microsoft hounds

[Red Flayer]

Marketing not only shows a contempt for Democracy (Marketing for candidates), but contempt for Markets (which are supposed to work with "perfect information", the very thing marketing avoids.)

I don't think that's always the case. What if you have a good product that no one knows about? There's a lack of information in the market, which marketing can help fix.

The problem is dishonesty in marketing, not marketing itself.

Re:Microsoft hounds

[nacturation]

Are they lyers and fradusters?

Hey, did you see that Jim Carrey movie "Lyer, Lyer"? I think it's about some guy who makes soap.

In related news...

[Maniacal]

Microsoft Corporation announced today that customers who deploy their server solutions can save over $400,000 when compared to deploying a solution based on SUSE Linux.

Customer != users

[gmuslera]

Each company could be count as one customer, but theirs hundreds of users could count in the price of the license.

Re:Free?

[Maniacal]

And I think we should all write the name SUSE as "$U$E" to make up for the way we've been unfairly referring to "M$" all these years.

Re:Free?

[Xugumad]

OpenSUSE is free: http://www.opensuse.org/en/ - we run it here.

SUSE is not free. However, when your Oracle server has decided to keel over on the development server, and you've spent a couple of hours now trying to find out why, you really begin to wonder if it wouldn't have been cheaper to pay for the version with support and be able to call someone (OpenSUSE isn't an officially supported Oracle platform, so we couldn't even call them) and have them fix it.

The numbers are there

[jpobst]

If you click the links in the slashdot summary, you'll end up at the original announcement, which told you roughly how many subscriptions the deal was for: 70,000.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116249026689311557-helTbrheLKgbaJ5iO5z40ZFCiOs_20061109.html?mod=blogs

I guess that's not as much fun as wild speculation though.

Now I get it.

[Joe Snipe]

When you put it that way, Windows 7 ultimate is a bargain!

Re:Value of Software

[koiransuklaa]

Your posts are usually insightful and this one is on the whole no exception. However, I have to comment on the "The[y] could just have just as easily chosen Linux": that statement totally forgets the monopolies Microsoft has been able to build in the last fifteen years (legally or otherwise) and the "traps" that were built on top of those monopolies. Most operating system customers _cannot_ choose non-MS products, and that is not just because the competing products themselves aren't good.

The OS and document format monopoly, the IE-trap that many companies unknowingly stepped into ten years ago and the well documented anti-interoperability stance that seemed to be the M.O. at Microsoft for some time... These things may not be illegal (although I expect they may be in combination) but I have no problem calling them immoral.

In any case saying that customers have a choice is bollocks. They had a choice ten years ago, and hopefully will again after five or ten years... Let's hope so.

Re:Free?

[Sebilrazen]

Wait, £ is 'e,' 'g,' and 'G?' and 'e' is both '£' and '€?' I thought English was confusing.

3.5 years later

[neurovish]

Novell stock has lost 30%

Microsoft stock has lost 1%

Redhat stock has gained 78%

Good going Novell, yet another stellar business decision. The $240mil had to have been the value of the entire deal, which was mostly beneficial to Microsoft in that they weren't going to be sued by Novell since Novell owns a lot of the UNIX patents. The licenses were being resold by Microsoft at prices substantially less than ($240/77)x1000

Re:Bad math alert!

[tomhudson]

When it comes to Novell+Microsoft,, there hasn't been much clear thinking making the rounds.

For example, the whole Mono fiasco. de Icaza is a Microsoft fanboy, but that doesn't mean that openSuse is somehow "contaminated" by Mono. Just remove mono-base with teh package manager and it all goes bye-bye. Your machine will continue to work just fine (actually, better than fine since doing so also removes Kerry Beagle, resulting in a much more responsive machine).

Then there's the whole "patents deal" hysteria. What do I care about what Microsoft claims the deal was about? Ultimately, Ballmer is a snake-oil salesman, after all. The deal was more likely made as a back-door way to compensate Novell for the expenses Microsoft indirectly caused by financing the SCO attack against linux, which Novell has been doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the courts - remember, there was talk about piercing the corporate veil wrt the $50 million PIPE deal.

SLED is not opensuse. There may be stuff in SLED (which has proprietary extensions and applications), that needs Microsoft's okay for virtualization to work with Microsoft products. So what? Doesn't affect me, since I can't see any scenario where I would want to run linux instances hosted on a Microsoft server, or Windows instances hosted on a linux server.