Microsoft Unbundles Software For NY City

doishmere writes "Microsoft has agreed to sell individual pieces of software to NY City workers, rather than forcing each seat to buy a full suite of software. The city has created three classes of users based on which pieces of software they need to perform their job, and Microsoft will sell software packages tailored to each class at a reduced price."

Comments

The Key Is

[DannyO152]

Getting money for something someone else has done. The NYC employees uses a Mac or LibreOffice, it matters not, Microsoft still collects.

Re:The Key Is

[froggymana]

You know that you can run Microsoft Office 2007 in Wine, right? It works very well and I have never had any problems with it on Linux. You just have to install a few extra things, but thats fairly easy with wine-tricks. I do a fair amount of things in it for school.

I haven't tried Microsoft Office 2010 yet though, so its hard for me to say if it works or not.

Re:Microsoft

[somersault]

It's impressive that you typed that well thought out post (your first post, no less!) all in one minute after the story was made public, despite lack of a subscriber account. It's almost like you knew beforehand that this story was going to appear and wanted to get some pro MS sentiment in before anyone else had a chance to say anything..! How much were you paid for that, exactly?

Clippy says:

[MrEricSir]

It looks like you're shilling for Microsoft. Would you like to:

* Talk about how Microsoft solutions are enterprise ready
* Bash Google and/or Apple for no apparent reason
* Mention the hidden costs of open source
* Cleverly forget to mention Microsoft disasters such as Bob, the Zune, Windows Mobile, or Vista

Re:Clippy says:

[h4rr4r]

We have seen how this company operates over many years.

Saying something nice is fine, posting an obvious premade shill piece is not.

Re:Clippy says:

[Dancindan84]

What, was ME just too below the belt?

Re:Clippy says:

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

It looks like you're shilling for Microsoft. Would you like to:

* Talk about how Microsoft solutions are enterprise ready
* Bash Google and/or Apple for no apparent reason
* Mention the hidden costs of open source
* Cleverly forget to mention Microsoft disasters such as Bob, the Zune, Windows Mobile, or Vista

Just once I would like to see a +5 accusation of shilling include a solid rebuttal.

Re:Clippy says:

[randallman]

That's actually a really good point. I suspect there may be a correlation between age and views about MS. In fact, I'm sure that luring in young developers (counting on them not knowing MS history) is on their agenda.

Over the past 15 years, I've gone from pro-MS to agnostic to "avoid when possible" based largely on their behavior. But young developers don't know about DR-DOS, Netscape, MS JVM, or even the recent OOXML fiasco. So for those that don't understand the reasons for the seemingly automatic negative responses, a single action doesn't eclipse an entire history or even come close to meaning that they've "changed" as the shill put it.

If MS wants to gain respect, they've got to consistently play nice. That means supporting standards instead of trying to own them. That means playing nice instead of trying to lock out competitors with their monopolies. But I really can't see this happening unless they are broken up or they lose enough market share so that they're forced to compete on merit. They're too addicted to their current business of locking in customers and leveraging their monopolies.

Re:Clippy says:

[mcgrew]

Not me. Over the past 30 years, I've gone from pro-MS to agnostic to "avoid when possible" based largely on their software. I just don't like being forced to do things "the Microsoft way". I don't like the way they change stuff from version to version for no apparent reason. I don't like the planned obsolescence. I don't like the way they handle security.

I do like Excel -- or at least, I liked Excel 2000. Not so happy about 2003 or 2007, but Excel is still better from other spreadsheets I've tried. But that's about it.

Re:Microsoft

[h4rr4r]

If you're one of those that appreciate quality, you go with Microsoft.

Is this sarcasm?

I mean you even mention the red ring of death producing machine right there.

Re:Microsoft

[betterunixthanunix]

and it's what everyone uses in lower division college courses

Really? I see Eclipse all over the place. Maybe I have not look around enough though...

Re:Microsoft

[Nadaka]

Really? I had to use vi through a remote terminal. But I think my professor may have been a sadist.

Re:Microsoft

[MrEricSir]

Depends. Are you posting comments praising it that are unrelated to the topic?

Re:Shouldn't they have been doing this

[tverbeek]

I'm old enough to remember when Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Project, Visio, and whatever else MS is bundling these days as "Office" were simply separate products, which anyone could buy individually. "Microsoft Office" was just a less expensive way to get a bunch of them together. They were put together to leverage the more popular apps in the package, to entice (and then lock) users into using the less successful ones. The idea was to cut into (for example) WordPerfect sales by giving people who were already going to buy Excel a discounted copy of Word to go along with it. Or if you wanted Word and Powerpoint, you could get Excel along with them for a lot less than buying a separate license for Lotus 1-2-3. It worked, obviously, and now it's totally impractical to pick and choose which apps you want. If you want WordPerfect for its markup capabilities and Excel for its charting options, you pretty much have to pay for a bunch of other software you don't want to go with them.

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the last three digits of the ID number on the GP's new account. I think his affiliations are pretty clear.

Does this mean they have to do this for the feds?

[dcavanaugh]

GAO contracts usually have a "most favored customer" clause, meaning that any better offer to another customer is automatically offered to the federal government. I wonder that such terms apply in this case.

Re:Microsoft

[marcello_dl]

No. Microsoft giving customers a reasonably well packaged offering is the news item.

If you want to praise someone for this you ought to praise the existence of macs, linux, openoffice.

Re:Poor New Yorkers!

[fermion]

This just happened again the other day. Older version of MS Word on an older machine. I know that updates can loaded and filters can be installed, what I do not understand is why file formats cannot be made somewhat backwards compatible by establishing a system of conditional statements. Of course such a feature would only encourage people not to pay for upgrades, which would be very bad.

Anyway Openoffice solved the problem. There are features that open office does not have, like collaboration, is handled by Google Docs. I had no problem paying MS money until the day when reliability was called into question.

Re:Microsoft

[ignavus]

And after 20 years, there still
isn't anything that comes even close to Visual Studio as a development environment.

*cough* *cough* And after 34 years, there still isn't anything that comes even close to Vi.

There! Fixed that for you.

Nah its not us

[voss]

I wish Linux and openoffice had been the motivator. Google Apps and gmail
is to be given credit for this one. Microsoft is scared s--tless of google apps because
its catching on in the enterprise where Microsoft's bread and butter is. If
lower tier workers can use google and google apps for 90% of their work then their bosses
will figure out how to shift the other 10% on to others. It also deprives them of revenue
from Outlook when google hosts email on their servers.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Microsoft

[Hylandr]

Well, at least he's right about Visual Studio(as far as Windows is concerned). The fact that the Express version is free AND comes with a free implementation of MSSQL only cements it in because it is the entry point, it's free, and it's what everyone uses in lower division college courses. No better way to lock in your market

This is why they made Marijuana Illegal.

- Dan.

Re:Shouldn't they have been doing this

[Gadget_Guy]

I'm old enough to remember when Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Project, Visio, and whatever else MS is bundling these days as "Office" were simply separate products, which anyone could buy individually.

You still can buy them separately. I was just looking at a pricelist earlier today that showed Word, Excel, Outlook and Access as individual items. If you wanted more than one product then you were much better off buying the cheapest Office package.

What exactly is new here?

[Lonewolf666]

For sufficiently large customers or groups of customers, it has always been possible to get special offers from Microsoft. I think the city of New York qualifies for this category.

For comparison:
In the early 90s, Microsoft created the XP Corporate edition that does not need activation, to appease large customers who were worried about losing the ability to install their copies of XP.
Later, Microsoft shared source code with some universities and government agencies to counter the advantage of Open Source in being more accessible for security audits.

Re:Microsoft

[itlurksbeneath]

Hmm.. Jdeveloper (from Oracle) is free as is Eclipse and NetBeans, and not just the crippled versions. The super-duper versions are free, too. Oracle XE is free as well, along with MySQL and PostgreSQL. There are other alternatives to Microsoft when it comes to free software. Most of the others don't have strings attached, too.

Disclamer: I do not work for Oracle. I wasn't paid by anybody to say this. Hell, I wish I was - I could use the extra cash.