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Microsoft Steeply Raising Enterprise Licensing Fees
hypnosec writes "Microsoft is trying to make up for below expected earnings following Windows 8's and Surface RT's lack luster adoption rates by increasing the prices of its products between 8 and 400 per cent. Trying to make more out of its enterprise customers who are tied under its Software Assurance payment model, Microsoft has increased user CALs pricing 15 per cent; SharePoint 2013 pricing by 38 per cent; Lync Server 2013 pricing by 400 per cent; and Project 2013 Server CAL by 21 per cent."
Microsoft method: Milk them for every cent.
Linux method: Free is free. Nobody can hold a gun to your head under the GPL.
corporations are more responsive than ever to finding and deploying alternatives to Microsoft software. let's hope this spurs more open source development.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Someone I know raised this point. Is there anyone they haven't alienated? Customers, suppliers, ISVs, OEMs?
For Ballmer to keep his job, Microsoft needs to make a profit. Last quarter it made a loss, Ballmers excuse was a one-time write off. However Windows 8 is flopping, Surface is failing, and he needs to show a profit.
So he's massively ramping up the prices for the locked in customers, in the long term, they'll move away from Microsoft products, but in the short and medium term, they'll have to bend over and take it.
After Ballmer has run the company for 10 years and it's been in decline, you have to realize that astroturfers cannot save him, he needs to go. No more excuses.
I see: so if demand goes down, price goes up?
Good luck with that ...
Their hardware and software are all losing ground, so to make up for lost profit they don't decide to innovate or anything like that. Instead, the obvious solution is to raise prices to make up for their losses. ... Too bad there are forces at work in the market called Supply and Demand. With strategies like this, MS's days are numbered.
"Rate hike! Rate hike! Tra, la, la!"
- Palmer, Final Fantasy 7. Steve Ballmer's alter ego.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
It does a number of things, some of them vaguely useful, but none as well as other stand-alone tools, it's awkward as hell, and people hate using it.
Raise the price on it and even some of the most MS-centric IT shops will go "Fine, we'll just set up an internal Apache server and Confluence instead."
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I'm a Microsoft guy through and through, when it comes to the enterprise. These licensing costs are just getting really difficult to justify. I know there's some open source replacement available, but it's not all very coherently tied together the way MS stuff is. I'd love to be able to move away though.
a few more points and linux will take over, finally.
in the 80s various flavors of UNIX locked their customers' data in expensive licensing deals.
then one day, windows NT came out and showed a cheaper way. around the same time Linux also came but only a few saw Windows as just another trap.
Now we have a prophecy realized.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Cities are moving back to Microsoft products after failed Linux experiments. This is the best time to raise the prices as much as possible.
It wasn't long ago I saw on OSNews that Windows 8 was selling great; now supposedly it's not. To be honest, I had a hard time believing that it was pushing new PCs faster than they would go to begin with, despite the artificial sales boost in the form of dirt-cheap upgrade discounts. So really, given the fact that Microsoft basically has all the OEMs in their pockets and a "Windows sale" is really just a "new PC sale," how the hell can any such claims of "Windows sales" be made anyway? Isn't that an impossible number to pin down, given that most new PC buyers will be stuck with Windows 8 due to Microsoft pushing it and all the OEMs pre-loading it by default as a result?
Microsoft has increased user CALs pricing 15 per cent; SharePoint 2013 pricing by 38 per cent; Lync Server 2013 pricing by 400 per cent; and Project 2013 Server CAL by 21 per cent."
Allow me to translate, for Australian license partners,
Microsoft has increased user CALs pricing 45 per cent; SharePoint 2013 pricing by 114 per cent; Lync Server 2013 pricing by 1200 per cent; and Project 2013 Server CAL by 63 per cent."
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Now we have a prophecy realized?
Now we have a property realized.
OK I'm not a fan boy, don't like gnome 3 (aka Red Hat Gnome 3), don't know if I like Lennart Poettering^H^H^H... I mean PulseAudio and SystemD, but I do like their open source stance and use their products.
So any increase in MS prices is good for Red Hat and, I hope, by extension, good for the Linux community.
It's also good for Oracles' Unbreakable Linux, which sucks.
Samba4 is looking pretty good now.
We may well shift to Samba 4 over then next year or so, just maybe just the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back.
These idiots who didn't see it coming from miles away deserve to be squeezed by these assholes.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
They raise prices and drive more business away. Does Ballmer think he's running a phone company or something?
"Tired of holding sway over a group of clients who have remained steadfast in their use of Microsoft products, the tech giant is doing all it can to give them reason to leave the fold by incentivizing alternatives and souring relations."
I mean, seriously, Microsoft? In the face of a less-than-expected level of consumer response to your recent flagship products, you decide to punish your remaining, loyal client base by raising their prices at a time when viable (and oftentimes cheaper) alternatives are becoming available and are being adopted in greater and greater numbers? This makes no sense.
When will Ballmer be kicked out already? Microsoft has smart people working there. If someone actually managed to clean house and eliminate all of the ridiculous middle management they have, I wouldn't be surprised if they could start putting out some decent stuff again. And, I'm saying that as someone who lumps himself in with Apple fanboys. I want to see Microsoft strong again and making products that people actually consider instead of scornfully rejecting, but I want to see them earn that spot through innovation and good design.
As a small business owner, I was looking to implement SharePoint Server. I've downloaded the evaluation, getting the hardware together (have the server, need the drives/more RAM). Now I see that this already bloated {overpriced} software is going to go up by 38%. I don't know where I'm going to turn to, but it was on the outside edge of what I could afford. Now, to research the market for other options. Viable suggestions would be appreciated. Is it time to add a section to Slash that would have replacement recommendations options or for overpriced [MS] software?
Their customers will either take it up the ass or finally switch to something else. Here's hoping that there's a mass defection from these assholes and criminals.
Both have only been out for about a month. It's too early to really tell how either of them are doing. It also takes time to make decisions about pricing.
This is an Indian news site. You have to ask yourself how much is due to changes in the exchange rate? I think at least some of the increases could be attributed to that.
I wish Ozzie would have caused a shareholders revolt and made Ballmer get fired back in the Vista days. It's too bad Bill Gates won't open his eyes and see that his business partner is sinking the company he created. Ballmer will go down as one of the worst CEOs in history if the company even survives in the future. Sure Apple is making billions in iPad and iPhone sales but, it's only a matter of time before they alienate their user base, and Android vendors starts churning out even cheaper tablets that do the same thing, that even a lawsuit can't stop. Just because the grass is greener on the other side doesn't mean you should be doing the same thing. Sustainable growth is key not one time profits, and enterprise is probably the one market area Microsoft should never abandon, but as time goes on it's apparent they would rather try and make a cash grab at markets they are obviously too slow to respond to. Maybe if they actually made the Courier back in 2008 and pushed the Surface table PC at an affordable price they wouldn't be in such an awkward postion.
If that was the case, he'd add an extra fee per document and per megabyte of data stored as well.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Just before the release of samba4
not "per cent"
I switched away my company from all Microsoft technology two years ago.
Good bye, suckers.
That's what it is.
i'd be the last to defend ballmer, but that quarterly (4/12 to 6/12) "loss" was due to writing down the $6+ billion acquisition of aquantive.... which was stupidly bought (at a grossly overvalued price) while uncle bill was still in charge.
without the writedown on the books, they would have made MORE than during the same quarter the year prior.
First I have to comment on the huge number of at least acceptable comments above that were modded down to 0. Very odd, but it seems that the pro MS down modders ran out of karma points after the first few dozen anti MS posts.
.net) was a great way to make quick windows applications and for a while it got better and better. Then Visual Studio made Windows C++ programming way easier than that Borland C++ ever did (OWL was crap). These were products made to make my life better and they did. The impression I had of MS in the past was some hot shit programmers crowded around chalkboards, terminals, and doing the cool. Now my impression is that the programers are all third rate and completely beaten down by layer upon layer upon layer of useless middle and sort of upper middle managers. Now the only goal at MS seems to get a little revenue goose to impress their shareholders for 5 minutes. I doubt they will be as impressed in 5 years.
I have said it before: MS is doing nothing to bring me back. I like MySQL better than SQL, Apache better than IIS, CentOS command line better than Server, Mac OS X better than any windows. I haven't used Visual Studio in long enough that I can't compare it to XCode. On my Mac I can run all my critical commercial software plus it mostly reacts like Linux so another strike against MS. I use my xbox for gaming and it smells like Linux might become a force in gaming (to be seen). I think that I am a pretty typical geek in that I have an xbox as my only MS product. Now most corporate types are on Windows but that is often because they have WidgetManager 2000 running on all their XP systems. I have even seen corporations that have to play all kinds of games to buy new machines and get XP onto them legally so that their old crap keeps working. Few of these companies have managed to make the Linux desktop transition for the first reason of legacy software but for the second reason of MS Office. I don't personally use it but in a corporate environment OpenOffice just doesn't cut it. But the moment some group gets together and ports the OpenOffice code to C++ awesomeness will happen. My favorite word program for Mac is Bean. It is C++ and rocket fast. It doesn't do much but that is a feature.
So looking at Microsoft as a tech professional I would never in a zillion years recommend that a new corporate system be based in the MS world and I suspect that there is a horde of non MS people making the same consistent recommendations to various companies. Many of these companies don't change because of inertia but one of the things that slows down an object moving by inertia is friction and this price increase will add to the MS friction. I doubt that there will be a huge wave of people vomiting out MS from their company due to this smallish increase. What there will be is a slight increase in the trend of people using non MS products. In the corporate world it is usually the negative trends that get you. People didn't stop using film overnight but Kodak couldn't get ahead of the trend and Kodak basically invented the digital point and shoot.
I don't hate MS but it gives me zero reason to love it yet I remember the days when I did. Visual Basic (before
Microsoft are fucking idiots. Every enterprise customer they have already wants to get away from them, but the cost of migration is just too steep. What they did here was change that... even if the new rates still keep the cost bellow some threshold that would make it easier to migrate to something else, what they've really done is say to all their customers "We will price gouge you in the middle of a recession" and you can bet every IS/IT department in the country is going to be having meetings regarding just how quickly it'll really take to get out from under the chains of .NET
The android desktop OS is coming... we all know it. It'll be free and Google will have hordes of experts ready to fly out to your site and help you migrate... then what Microsoft?
As a small business owner, I was looking to implement SharePoint Server. I've downloaded the evaluation, getting the hardware together (have the server, need the drives/more RAM). Now I see that this already bloated {overpriced} software is going to go up by 38%.
I don't know where I'm going to turn to, but it was on the outside edge of what I could afford. Now, to research the market for other options. Viable suggestions would be appreciated. Is it time to add a section to Slash that would have replacement recommendations options or for overpriced [MS] software?
That is precisely the point relying on nothing but AD and Microsoft's enterprise solutions is going to byte you in the ass there is nothing you can do about it because no doubt you have a bunch of desktops that will cost you a fortune to keep running legacy software that is concocted with Windows binaries only. Think of what this means in countries like Canada where the entire health care system uses some locked down system of rented Windows licenses and tonnes of second party Windows software binaries for their networks.
I predict that Microsoft will be forced to yield on these increases, the board will take a corporate across the board loss and the software writers will all take a pay cut to keep their jobs. Ballmer will be gone and forgotten in 6 months because of this.
IF THIS DOES NOT OCCUR THEN
This is a huge chance for IBM, RedHat, Novell/Suse to step up and clean up on the situation by getting on board (quite literally) with Lenovo, Dell, Adobe, HP and others by creating a complete and reasonably priced replacement for MS Server, AD, MSSQL, Access, Outlook, Excel, and Word processing on the Linux kernel using LSB that can interface into IBM or whoever's other servers running agreed upon LSB kernels or Unix/BSD based kernels that would have LSB and easily be cross compatible. Unlike Windows Servers. ( and most importantly a virtual server environment to run legacy windows applications on the servers that cold be available to the workstations) All the legacy software that keeps you on Windows XP could easily be phased out that way!
This could and would completely knock Microsoft for six and guess what they bloody well deserve it! Gang up on them and they will lower their prices or die really quick because everywhere there are shops currently using older Lenovo, Dell, HP and custom XP work stations that could switch in an instant to a real alternative and not have to 1.) upgrade ram, 2.) lease all new workstations 3.) replace all server hardware. An upgrade from XP and Server 2003 or 2008 inevitably means dumping hardware again and it is just not going to happen over night like it did for Windows XP. There is no room in the economy for it to happen to be precise.
The hardware requirements for Windows 8 are the same as those for 7 and guess what the majority of the millions of work stations out there with 1 gig of ram or less just are not good enough for the task and this is exactly what sank the rapid adoption of Vista and 7. The vast majority of work stations in grocery warehouses, banks, as well as small business are still running XP and this because of the ridiculous hardware requirements for Vista, 7 and 8 workstations.
I said this when 7 came out if it cannot run reasonable well on 10 year old hardware with as little as 512 meg of ram as a work station then lookout it is in real trouble.
I am being proved correct, the economy of today cannot afford Microsoft's software hardware upgrade tread mill and now the chickens will come home to roost and shit on Redmond and their current vendor lock in monopoly. There is the talent out there to create a stable simple networked workstation replacement for XP using both cheaper low end new and older gear. Now perhaps business is going to demand it.
There is absolutely no reason why a simple workstation needs over one gig of ram or an expensive processor and low end gaming 3d graphics to run a frigging
Move CIFS shares to my netapp, move email back to a nix box, encourage users to jump to tablets, macs, or nix workstations (all of which are easier to support than Windows).
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
As massive licence buyers are heavily negotiating the official prices, we won't get a Linux landslide... do not expect those prices to be applied to governments or big companies.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
The article is a bit alarmist. On average prices for equivalent functionality are going up at 5% or less, with some holding steady (Exchange, Office 365).
However, several products are simplifying the product lineup - if you go to the article they reference:
http://www.softcat.com/news/industry-news/important-changes-to-microsoft-products-announced
You can see that Sharepoint is taking three SKUs and replacing it with a single SKU. Lync is taking the Standard and Enterprise SKU and replacing it with a single SKU. Visio is reducing their SKUs from three to two. In each case they are comparing the new SKU cost with the lowest cost SKU that previously existed, even when the new SKU is significantly more functional than the SKU being compared against.
If you were previously relying on the cheapest SKU, this could mean a significant price bump, but if you were previously relying on the most expensive SKU, it's probably a price cut. If you're already on the cheap SKU, you're probably a small business and Office 365 (hosted versions of these products) starts looking attractive.
Aquantive was bought at a discount to the price IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORTH to Microsoft. It was to be there centerpiece online advertising, the core business of Google. It was to do the advertising on a set of popular Microsoft properties.
HE RAN THE ONLINE BUSINESSES INTO THE GROUND, he never bought the companies that could deliver the visitors, Bing never became popular, and he wasted the money paying Baidu and Yahoo to run the search results and take the adverts.
So Aquantive, don't have online businesses to advertise on. So what he's done is to shove all the failures of the online business onto one massive write down of Aquantive and puts the blame on Gates.
He's destroying Microsoft to stay in his job. He's clearly shown his inability to grow the business, to grow the online business, and he's clearly going to sacrifice Microsoft to keep his job until the company is near death.
The board needs to act, he needs to be removed.
Enterprise is MS cash cow and cows are milked and cows that protest to loudly are killed for fun, meat and an example to other cows.
The farmer does not care what the cow thinks of him, the opinion of cattle is worthless. Their enterprise customer have shown over decades to be completely incapable of independent thought so why should they change now? Oh, this price increase is the straw that broke the camels back? Breaking a back only works in animals that have a back bone. Cattle does not. The reason you can overwork donkeys and cows and dogs is because they are dumb animals that are easily domesticated. A smart animal would resist long before you overload it. Enterprise customers have not resisted. In fact, they resist every which way they can to any attempt to set themselves free or at least not be under complete and total control of their Microsoft master. Just go ahead, ask for a Linux desktop at a large Enterprise business like say Shell just to come up with a name. Can't be done. These slaves don't just accept the whip, they buy it for their master, oil it so it gives optimal whipping power and turn in anyone who tries to set them free or introduce laws trying to limit the amount of whipping that can be done.
And you think these Enterprise customers can be alienated? Same with the OEM's. They could have EASILY done a Linux machine by now. They didn't. And nothing MS will do will change that. They are OEM's, not Apple or a (the old) Nokia, they sell cheap clones with a generic OS and make their money from crapware. They don't have the willpower, brains, imagination to do anything else. Oh they might protest a bit, just like a cow might kick and kill a farmer but just as the cow will then just stand there and wait to be killed, the OEM's will throw a hissy fit and then assume the position again to be shafted by their beloved master.
Ballmer is a lot of things but one thing he really is, is a good sales manager. He knows just how much to squeeze the market for. And don't worry, any Enterprise that balks about a 400% price increase will get a special discount, just for them of say a 10% discount, now ain't you a special little cow! Any MS rep gives their big customers massive discounts. Just all big Enterprises give their loyal customers a big discount and NONE of them ever figure out that if THEY only give discounts that are less then the previous price increase, someone else might do the same to them.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So what in effect you're saying, is that Aquantive couldn't take 2.5% of GOOG's business, and thus wasn't worth the $6 billion. He couldn't even deliver 2.5% of the necessary traffic to achieve that.
Ballmer is not even 2.5% of the management that Google is.
Just imagine, if Surface RT had come out, with a 100% touch interface and MS Office had done a proper touch interface. They would have had a killer product on their hands. Instead MS Office division fails to deliver a touch version, Surface then gets botched with a load of Desktop Windows support, and the product flops in the market.
So who does Ballmer kick out? The Office division leaders? Nope. He kicked out the guy who had to work with the botches and deliver something.
Ballmers leadership is the problem here, he's clearly out of his depth. He's just a shouty salesman that happened to get that role because he shouts a lot and he needs to be ejected for the good of MSFT. They still can compete, but they need to lose the imbecile.
The company I work for tried the "independent thought" version for a long time. Resisting using Microsoft tools (apart from a minimal AD and XP on the PCs).
Until it was obvious that the collaboration environment was simply not there and hurting our business in a really bad way.
Then they went out and researched the offerings available (yes, they did real research).
Guess what? In the collaboration environment, only Microsoft could deliver. The price tag was huge (by my standards anyway). The implementation was not without problems, but in the end we got there. The full package with Exchange, Lync, SharePoint. Now it works like a dream.
The reason management went with it? It gives us value for the money. Return on investment. And that is what management want. Whether it is IT or any other part of the business. Return on investment.
It was a superb alternative to getting any work done. I'm sure that many of the people who chose to fight those battles saw some upside from their foolish devotion further down the road. But it was a long road. WinNT wasn't even much of a lock-in all by itself. But so many corporations just couldn't wait (this was the dotcom boom, remember?) to encapsulate mission critical business-logic in VB for IE4. Fifteen years later, their successors are wailing "will this rogering ever stop?" Convenience, self-determination, market relevance: pick any two. Lesson learned.
What Microsoft is presently doing is established practice in the enterprise life cycle. When lock-in is your cash cow, and competitors are making your technology irrelevant, take all you can get. Few corporations with a cash cow as large as Microsoft's are found at the innovative fore-front until the cash cow is slaughtered.
If they must kill the beast to re-invent themselves, it makes good sense to first fill their pockets. The only real question here is whether they should pay this windfall out to their existing shareholders, or reinvest these funds to stick around at the top of the heap.
Disencumbered of the cash cow, does Microsoft still have what it takes to remain technologically relevant?
SQL Server 2012 To Bring Some Price Hikes
http://redmondmag.com/articles/2012/03/23/sql-server-2012-price.aspx
No wonder there so many odbc install questions related to firebird sql
ps : customers are very sensitive to price hikes
developer http://flamerobin.org
It's a common mis take.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
ShartPoint works, too.
Seriously, this kind of new news and no:
"The more you tighten your grip, Ballmer, the more installations will slip through your fingers. "
Heck one could even use the reply:
"Not after we demonstrate the capabilities of these patents."
True for SharePoint they did an increase of the CAL pricing.
On the other hand they removed license fee's for external users and significantly lowered the price for public facing SharePoint sites.
I guess it's all in the Eye Of The beholder.
The pay the increase and keep telling yourself, the whipping feels good and helps you lead a more productive life.
I have no use for the opinions of a slave or cow myself. Go sell your story to a MS rep, you might get a special discount if he can tell it to other cows.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Microsoft has built a towering edifice of customer lock-in, terrible to behold. Eventually, in the fullness of time, the edifice will fall. We may be seeing the start of that process.
Microsoft is pricing themselves out of the market. What?!? you might ask... How could they make their products any more expensive and expect to survive? That is the million dollar question.
I guess you think it's smart to swim against the current too.
I only react on "bathroom remake" offers at least. I have some requirement for a new firewall, a SAN, groupware, email and a huge database server. Please reply with "your best offer" to lazyos.korruptis@fat-corp.com.
Open source does not qualify. How can that possibly contribute to my new yacht ??
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...based on the usage? (yeah I know, I'm just bored and really to want to be at work this morning...)
Hah, poor sap never heard of Zimbra and KnowledgeTree. Ah well, good luck with your cripple Sharepoint, you deserve it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We saw this coming and bought 100% of our replacement servers and OSes and CALs and Exchange and Exchange CALs on Nov 30th. We're migrating from 4 older servers down to 2 so this just made up speed up and buy em at the last second instead of waiting 2 more weeks. Take that, Microsoft.
Also, others' claims above aren't far off about companies actually switching. We NEED certain MS-only enterprise apps but at $453 a piece for Office Pro Plus OLP, guess who's testing Libre Office Base with our Access databases this week.
As much as i don't like windows 8, the price hike is not due to slow sales of windows 8, but a push to hosted services. What Microsoft is trying to do is make it more expensive to run an in-house clout that to use the existing cloud they host. I have already done a cost comparison for my employer and as of a month ago it was a wash, it cost the same to host our environment in the cloud as to support it locally over a 5 year span. Now if you raise the price of the local licenses, well now the cloud looks more enticing.
Just to put things in a different point of view, since this whole thread has degraded in to the usual /. flame-war...
Let's say you went and bought yourself a snappy new car in 2005, let's say a Range Rover, and it cost about $55k. You love this car, you drive it every day, and over time little things need to be fixed, maintenance becomes more frequent, and you say, Hey maybe I should trade the old girl in, and get a new one; it's time. You head down to the dealer, and find a new Range Rover well equipped is $83k. OMG sticker shock! You grumble to the greasy-haired salesman about how you paid nearly $30k less a few years ago. He glances over at your '05 and makes a snarky "that old thing? not bad for her day.." comment. Before you can put your boot in his ass, he lures you in to the drivers' seat of the '13 Rover, and gives you the standard "let me show you how far these cars have come in the past few years" speech. At the end of the day, sticker shocked or not, you decide to keep your car a couple more years, so you can save up for a new one, or buy a "newer" used one, whichever makes the most sense at the time.
It's not that you don't want the new one, but sometimes in the current point of life cycle, it doesn't make sense to upgrade. It makes more sense to plan for it, budget for it, and maybe you won't make the jump straight from the 2005 Range Rover (Win XP) to the brand new 2013 (Win 8), because you won't see the value, but it may make more sense to go to the tried-and-true 2011 Rover (Win 7) with low miles, always garaged, and without the big unknowns that come with a brand-new model (Win 8 again..).
The point is guys, prices go up (and we're discounting inflation), products continue to evolve. You must realize the operational costs of anything you own, and recognize it will not last forever. When you bought your new home computer 5 years ago, you knew it would last you 3-6 years. You'd upgrade the memory, maybe a new video card, possibly a new hard disk over that time. You'll buy games and software. There's also hidden costs: Power, your DSL/cable Internet service, any online subscriptions you may have, any time you spend fixing it (you cannot discount your own skilled labor, even if it's a labor of love). There is some ongoing cost of ownership. Businesses budget Total Cost of Ownership of computers, and plan for replacements (typically when hardware goes out of service agreements).
One last thing to consider: A few years back, ITIL asked Fortune 500 companies to identify the entire operating cost of a Desktop computer over a 3 year span. This means hardware, software, power, IT services, routine maintenance, back-end services such as patch management, Exchange, AD, every last thing. The numbers that every single company came back with were between $27,000 and $36,000. PER desktop computer. Those numbers are staggering, but that's the true cost of ownership. So, when you consider that one constant throughout that 3 year span is the per-seat operating system license, at roughly $120, it's really a small slice.
This sounds like a form of Bait and Switch, but alas I think I'm wrong by that definition. Most assuredly this move on the part of Microsoft is a full on Greed move.
You sell some group a license to your product and you define it at a specific rate, and then when you don't get the market share you want, you jack up the prices to those who have purchased your product. While a minimal increase in licensing fees may be legit, an extreme price jack sounds like a sure fire way to lose your customers and in a hurry.
Microsoft (or any other company with this model) get corporations tied to their products by making them so that the customer builds an infrastructure around the tools that were licensed, and then the company jacks the price up to some absurd fee price. The company believes the customer will pay because it would hurt their customer's business not to. So the mistake here is assuming your customers will stand for this more then once. They likely won't especially if it affects the customer's bottom line. Sadly it is this corporate mentality to never see profits dip in the financial world. Stock / Share holders want the biggest bang for their buck (unrealistic dividends), Boards try to meet those demands, and eventually you have one company's bottom line against another company's bottom line. One will lose.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Debian is raising their licensing fees too, about 500% from what I heard. So, 500% of 0 is? STILL FREE! What kind of moron PAYS for an operating system in 2012?
"Hey guys, I got a great idea, lets up the costs so more businesses won't want to switch to up!" /lower/ the prices of the new shit so people have an actual reason to switch other than "OH LOOK, SHINY AND NEW!"
God forbid they
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
"clamav": still has certification whilst the MS AV Guard doesn't.
"squid": to what is this not an alternative?
"dansguardian": to what is this not an alternative?
You are not living in the reality the rest of the world inhabits.
But when you do, the results, unlike the improvements to Closed Software, belong to you.
Agh the 'Death Rattles' begin. Should we get them a bracelet that says "DNR"?
Maybe the sock-puppets and astro-turfers - and the shills on BOTH sides of the Win/Lin divide - modded you down 'cause you're obviously not among the faithful.
Oh maybe he was modded down because its an overrated comment; much like your own. The comment is based on two statements that is if Microsoft Vanish...suddenly nobody will able to get work done, because that software is not available on other platforms. OMG! Well its just nonsense. All Applications that have any use exist on all platforms; existing code can be made to be cross-platform [designed for single platform just makes it more painful]; The void on iOS and Android had been filled in a few years each sporting 700,000 Applications. Arguing that inertia is good is a little sad.
The Second reason is even more Bizarre having Microsoft around will give Apple or Google competition. Ignoring the fact that Microsoft never compete by creating a better product, they bully;bribe;outlast the competition on the backs of its monopoly and its biiiillliooons. Ironically the very same reason why they have been so ineffective against either Apple or Google, because those same methods don't work against they are simply too large. The greatest insanity of this argument is it is presented in the same topic where Microsoft can extract more cash from its helpless customers, because its a Abusive Monopoly.
apple can make changes to OSX to let it run on all hardware or at least offer more hardware choice. Apple will need some kind of desktop mid tower maybe even a MB only for embedded / SBC settings. Build in screens do not work well setting like that and a bigger mini with better cooling and more ports / slots will be a nice fit there.
and if MS where to go down they may be forced to do that in EU.
...is that most government agencies gobble this stuff up, when other solutions do the job better. It's a scary thing working in a large government agency and seeing the billions being spent to prop these companies up for no good reason.
Unfortunately, the article has been slashdotted and is unavailable. I will say that unless the license fees have changed again in the past few days they are not being changed as a result of anything related to the success of win8 (or lack thereof). As an existing enterprise customer, we were told of the new pricing structure quite a long time ago now. Long before the release of Windows 8. It's the primary reason we've got teams trying to vet out a move to other database products instead of testing the new Microsoft one. SQL Server is now more expensive than Oracle (or mysql etc).
windows 8 needs to make metro apps run in a window and let metro apps over lap each other.
also the desktop needs to have a start menu.
"People, and especially decision makers, simply can't wrap their heads around not using Microsoft for everything. The mental impairment is very visible to me. It's one thing to prefer one thing over another, but another to not even learn what the truth may be." - by erroneus (253617) on Tuesday December 04, @05:32AM (#42177461) Homepage
I had much the same discussion, albeit regarding Delphi vs. VB &/or MSVC:
I showed mgt. studies from reputable sources too no less, AND FROM A COMPETING TRADE JOURNAL too!
(VBPJ/Visual Basic Programmer's Journal no less Sept./Oct. 1997 issue titled "Inside the VB compiler", of all places...)
Where Borland Delphi absolutely SWEPT THE FLOOR, OVERALL, with Microsoft stuff in these tests they ran @ VBPJ.
---
STRING PROCESSING:
Delphi = .275 seconds .6 seconds
MSVC++ =
VB5 = 4.091 seconds
(Delphi more than DOUBLED even MSVC++ here... & keep in mind, EVERY PROGRAM does some string processing work!)
MATH PROCESSING:
Delphi = 1.523 seconds
MSVC++ = 2.89 seconds
VB5 = 7.871 seconds
(Delphi "swept the floor" again here, just like in stringwork, math too... & again - EVERY PROGRAM DOES MATH + STRINGS WORK, mind you!)
TEXT BOX FORM LOADS:
MSVC++ = .020 seconds .069 seconds .072 seconds
Delphi =
VB5 =
GRAPHICS METHODS NATIVE TO COMPILER:
MSVC++ = .293 seconds .455 seconds .503 seconds
VB5 =
Delphi =
API GRAPHICS:
MSVC++ = .266 seconds .269 seconds .292 seconds
Delphi =
VB5 =
ACTIVE X FORM LOADS:
VB5 = .114 seconds .495 seconds .778 seconds
Delphi =
MSVC++ =
---
* Thus, after those results? Overall, with Delphi having the most 1st & 2nd
Hey - I felt JUST like YOU stated when it was "turned down" over VB being used...
Which yes, VB has a LOT of successful information systems running worldwide in it, but, so does Delphi (without the project failure rate of C++ oriented ones, and as you can see above? MORE SPEED!)
I was told this, as to the "business reasoning" behind the decision:
"Microsoft is a TITAN, with tons of ca$h reserves... they WILL be here tomorrow - will Borland?"
(And, there's your "business logic reasoning" in a nutshell!)
APK
P.S.=> It's NOT unwarranted, but I personally still would rather build the "best I can build" by default, if a language or IDE tool lends itself to better performance for a particular task, vs. what will be here tomorrow etc./et al (this is being a 'performance purist' on MY part though, not a businessman - were I looking at it from THEIR "POV"?? I'd be the same no doubt, for the SAME reasons!)...
... apk
death spiral, death spiral, death spiral,
DEATH SPIRAL!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Someone is copying and pasting this exact same troll in a number of stories.
Or rather, his decision -> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/04/mysql_new_vulns/
* It's VERY current (yesterday iirc) & shows a lot of reasons, security-based ones, that matter...
(Especially from a businesses' "pov" - nobody wants to walk into a wreck of that kind, since it can start "class-action" lawsuits for negligence etc./et al!).
Oracle's been "dragging their feet" on those security issues in mySQL (doubtless because it IS a form of "the competition", for their ORACLE DB, even if they own mySQL now!).
APK
P.S.=> Hope you got to take a peek @ this too, been there myself -> http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3291733&cid=42179371 since I didn't LIKE IT anymore than you did in your situation, but MONEY? Talk$... loud!
... apk
http://www.clearbooks.co.uk/ - Completely cloud/web based accounting.
Sorry, I have no idea if there is a US version, and of course it it quite specific about taxes and so on. But it was the best day of my software experience life when I switched from SAGE to Clearbooks. Not only does it do everything we need, but it is the first accounts package I have ever seen that anticipates your needs - "this account isn't really suitable for this transaction, your probably want to use x instead". "This is a large capital purchase, so it's been added to your asset register pending approval". OMG it's wonderful!!!
Yes, I'm an evangelist. Most accounting packages are so bad that it's like night and day when you see a good one. It includes...
- PAYE (uk equivalent of withholding)
- VAT (EU equivalent of sales tax)
- automated monthly importing of bank statements direct from bank websites
- automated matching of statement items with purchases and vendors
- automated asset management and depreciation
- automated filing of govt tax forms for VAT, corporation tax and others
- multicurrency, + international transactions in line with tax rules
- quicky stuff like small business flat rate VAT, agricultural taxes, partnership tax rules, etc etc
I may no longer actually need an accountant. I could never say that with other software. With this, I am beginning to think that he adds no value whatsoever.
and if MS where to go down they may be forced to do that in EU.
And why would that be? It's not like Apple are using one monopoly to gain in another market. They're a company that provides integrated computer systems, hardware+software. Even if they would have a monopoly I don't see any reason they should be split up, and be forced to sell their software to run on third-party hardware.
Shooting cash cows could be real fun. Google for instance has the power to simply dump 50 Million on Libreoffice to give them a hard time, when Microsoft pisses them- Apple could put 300 Mio into Wine development. All this is corporate pocket money and shows the potential. It needs a single pissed-off Sheik customer to crack the Microsoft monopoly.
Corporations and government agencies are CUTTING costs, and one of those options was looking at going to Linux for the desktop. All this will do is help make that a reality.
The funny thing is that this isn't true at all. The mood of the cattle (yeah, real cattle) can make or break a farm.
Rethinking email
but will they be able to stop Psystar 2 under a setting and tech field like that?
Around the time of the antitrust trial, there was a lot of talk of breaking up Microsoft, splitting off applications from operating systems.
Presumably this would have been Windows (all flavors) in one company and applications (Office, SQL, Exchange).
What I wonder is if maybe they would have been better off if this had happened. The OS people would have had greater flexibility, since they wouldn't have been tied as much to older applications and standards -- possibly making it easier for them to produce a more modern Windows. And possibly even a Windows desktop environment + API for Linux.
And the application people wouldn't have been limited to Windows only plus a weak Mac version; they could have been producing Exchange/SQL for Linux as well as Office for Linux.
Maybe it was supposed to be 40, not 400?
If it's not a typo, then the intent is to kill it with fire.
(40% is still ridiculous, Lync isn't all that to start with.)
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
No one pays list price for Microsoft products. Its all about negotiating with your reseller (or Microsoft itself, depending who you deal with).
If you're small, you can buy 2 licenses of windows server for 10 bucks over the price of 1.
If you're big (real big), you can have a bundle of everything under the sun for 20 bucks per user instead of multiple hundreds or thousand.
Those aren't numbers I made up, they're from real situations where I had to deal with microsoft licensing. I'm sure raising their base price affects some of their customers, but if you tell your reseller "Give me the old price or else", you'll get the old price.
Microsoft ... increasing the prices of its products between 8 and 400 per cent.
Isn't this one of the signs of a failing business model? Don't flame me, just askin'.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Payphones are not a profit center for the company, so if they're being used less and less then the per-call cost of installing/maintaining the phones will increase. At some point you need to increase the rates to cover the cost of the phones.
This article is a rediculous exaggeration. In the source article the author mentioned Microsoft being squeezed out from competition by Apple and Linux desktop variants. No disrespect, but yeah right. Linux desktop has been hovering at 2% marketshare for years and that hasn't changed. The author is clearly biased against Microsoft...so I clicked his source and found the real information. Only one product is going up 400% and it's freaking Lync. http://www.softcat.com/news/industry-news/important-changes-to-microsoft-products-announced. Lesson learned. Always check the source!
I was originally all *nix before getting into the industrial sector. I've been nothing but angry these past few years at how badly we get racked for licensing fees from MS. There are other vendors who are just as bad for there ERP systems and such but not the size of MS which seems to make it more palatable. This is especially so on upgrades because you get no discounts and no service if you don't spend twice as much on the service agreements which aren't worth any real value. To make things worse the business licensing is actually more expensive than buying single copies of MS software... Go figure.. I'll get off my soap box and to the point.
More and more I've been moving away from MS. I'm seeing this move especially so in the Office suite where I'm migrating a lot of people to Libre successfully using transitional xml (MS really needs to f'ing fix there bad standards). I see a lot of other people doing the same thing. You can't keep reselling people the same products like this. Other companies are seeing the problems MS is creating and one by one they're offering up proper solutions to get away from them and have options available. Right now it's office. How long until we see a *nix based distro that will integrate into AD? Or a proper replacement for Exchange/Outlook?
The reality is these fees are killing customers. I quoted a small Exchange server replacment last month. The server and OS around $4500 for everything. The licensing?... $22,000..... I've done postfix and sendmail systems with 150,000 plus users at the cost of the hardware and staff... wtf...
When the price goes up, the number of licenses sold goes down.
-_-
It's amazing. Butter-smooth.
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3291733&cid=42179727
* Just facts man... & as the singer Adele puts it?
"I set fire, to the rain..."
(Not trolling either - just stating facts, & VERY RECENT ones!)
APK
P.S.=> Does it do a good job, if setup right? Sure... look @ FACEBOOK (it uses a mySQL variant afaik & seems to "keep its shit together" well enough, but nevertheless, those security vulnerabilities ARE a MAJOR CONCERN!)...
... apk
"Then you tell them that that Android is based on the same OS as the iPhone, it's just a bit newer and more advanced." - by ColdWetDog (752185) on Tuesday December 04, @11:30AM (#42180319) Homepage
That's untrue man unless you look @ it in the "BROAD sense" of BOTH being *NIX variants...
However - in truth, iOS is BSD based, & Android is Linux kernel based, & yes, there IS a difference!
* I.E.-> They're NOT QUITE the same...
(Especially @ the commandline as well as the underlying API level (posix generics notwithstanding)).
APK
P.S.=> That'd be setting him up for a "fail" man - since MOST mgt. WILL "look into it" with his other colleagues (programmers) most likely (it's what they do when they don't have classical CSC training)... & I *think* you know that - lol, don't set the guy up for a fall is all I am saying here!
... apk
That's untrue man
Been there myself's why (a decade++ ago) -> http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3291733&cid=42179371
* There's the PERFORMANCE-ORIENTED perspective, & then, there's the "long-term support" viewpoint...
APK
P.S.=> Guess which one mgt. espouses & prefers...
... apk
OpenOffice and LibreOffice are already written in C++.
That article seems a little half baked, I mean aside from him just parroting another source.
"Microsoft’s payment model – Software Assurance has been enforced by Redmond onto those customers who have more than 50 licenses at their disposal and is one thing that has helped them gain steady revenue over the years."
I have hundreds of CALs across a few products and don't sub for software assurance, never have.
And you think these Enterprise customers can be alienated? Same with the OEM's. They could have EASILY done a Linux machine by now. They didn't. And nothing MS will do will change that. They are OEM's, not Apple or a (the old) Nokia, they sell cheap clones with a generic OS and make their money from crapware. They don't have the willpower, brains, imagination to do anything else. Oh they might protest a bit, just like a cow might kick and kill a farmer but just as the cow will then just stand there and wait to be killed, the OEM's will throw a hissy fit and then assume the position again to be shafted by their beloved master.
That's funny. I thought Dell was shipping computers with Linux preloaded (more expensive since it completely lacks bloatware). Then there is the Streak, which is an Android (Linux) device. They may be being very slow, but they certainly appear to be exploring Linux (dunno about FreeBSD).
...pre-MS owning Skype, I paid 15 EUR/year for a phone number. Last month I renewed and paid 100 EUR. I won't next year.
Google doesn't need Microsoft to innovate. Apple doesn't need Microsoft to be creative. They have been a big company with lots of "brainpower" for decades and yet they still seem unable to invent anything worthwhile that's new without hosing the implementation somehow. The last thing I can think of that Microsoft actually did that was good (which of course they promptly threw away) was AJAX.
When (not if, when) Microsoft finally goes the way of the dodo, nobody will care, because nobody ever really liked them, not even the shills paid to claim they "liked" them.
By the way, I don't think of them as Dr. Evil, as Dr. Evil was competent and Microsoft is just ... Microsoft. If they made a vacuum cleaner it would suck at sucking up dirt.
If I don't want to go the way the current is going, why would I?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
For the US, try Xero.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
Hey - I think I saw another one of your poorly copy/pasted shill posts earlier...
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3291733&cid=42176767
There it is!
What's that? Did we have piss-poor sales performance? I know how to fix that: drive away the rest of our customers.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.