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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."
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 ...
It's strong-arming if you vendor lock a customer than steeply raise rates. blah blah free market blah blah still an adversarial dick move.
I hate sigs.
It's a free market. Microsoft is not forcing anyone to buy its products. If may be mildly coercive in the short term to companies that feel they "must" use Microsoft products, but raising prices is also the best method to charge customers what the product is really worth to them.
If it's worth it to switch, they will. But if not, then fair is fair.
A free market? Are you shitting me? Microsoft has a near monopoly on corporate workstations. If it was a free market then you wouldn't need to make a free operating system like Linux just to try to compete. Microsoft has worked long and hard to make sure that nobody can compete with them by erecting barriers to the free market. The free market is Microsoft's enemy number one.
I think that was the point made in this story. Microsoft has worked hard over the years to make its systems not interoperable with others', so that customers had to buy the whole collection of enterprise services from just them.
Now that their products are apparently a worse deal in some cases than competing products from other vendors and/or open source software, their all-or-nothing strategy is at risk of backfiring spectacularly.
The tragedy, if one can call it that when Microsoft is suffering, is that this appears to be almost a play-for-play repeat of IBM's mistakes in the 1980's and 1990's, if I recall correctly. Microsoft should have seen this coming miles and miles away.
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."
You might think so, but remember that SharePoint is usually not purchased by the IT department. It's purchased either outside of the IT department for use by non-technical people, good luck with that btw, or it's forced upon everyone by clueless management at the urging of consultants who have a vested interest in plugging SharePoint as the "solution" to whatever "problems" management thinks exist. Microsoft should just change the marketing pitch to, "SharePoint is right for anyone with a credit card" because that's basically how they sell it. Anyway, it's only after the purchase has been made and the consultants are gone that people realize just how much SharePoint sucks. Of course by then it's generally to late too do anything about it because the expense of the project has blown the IT budget for the next three years. In fact, I've yet to hear of a SharePoint project that either delivered on its promises or didn't go way over budget, so raising the price can only makes matters even worse. For those of you out there who haven't experienced any of this, do yourselves a favor and push back against "PainPoint" or you'll regret it later guaranteed.
Funny, I've been running my Linux desktops for like 15 years, so I guess I'm not doing 95% of whatever the Windows people are using. Of course, we also use Linux on our desktops at work, which is like 200 machines, so I guess we don't get any work done either.
Windows is required for gaming, nothing else.
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.
If it was a free market then you wouldn't need to make a free operating system like Linux just to try to compete.
Just remember that Linus created Linux because the UNIX licenses were too expensive (this was the early 90's).
It was not created as an alternative to Windows, but an alternative to the expensive, proprietary UNIX versions. In that respect one can say that it has been a fantastic success.
Sure you can't run exchange, but there are plenty of alternatives many of which are a lot better.
Name one. Just one.
There's a reason that MS markets to PHBs and not to IT ya know...
Some people can't put their brains in that place.
At work a problem once ensued when a person wanted to set up an MSSQL server for a project. My boss said "too expensive." I asked what language, he said VB.net. I said great! Have you considered mysql? He said it would violate license agreements. I said mysql, he heard SQLExpress. Idiot. Another person my boss reports to believes mysql is not a professional database server. It is used by hobbyists. But also used by professionals. It's free. It can't be good right? Forget that commercial licenses can be had and that Oracle now owns it.
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.
Similar discussion about iPhone/iPad in the business while excluding Android. The reason? Android is unix based and can't be trusted.
Seriously. It's what they believe!!!
It's a well known problem. But MS doesn't care about fixing it, because the majority of their customers don't care about fixing it, therefore it's uneconomic to fix it, even for a $3 million customer.
Whereas with Free software, the same thing would apply if the same fault was present - most people wouldn't care about fixing it. But someone - maybe this 911 centre - would. And it would get fixed, even if they had to hire a contractor (out of their $3M savings from ditching MS). And probably the fix contributed back, so they don't have to keep hiring the contractor to patch their updates. And then the software is better, and their next years budget can be spent on improving something else. Something they actually wanted done, rather than what MS thinks would be good for their bottom line.
Another great problem with MS time handling is that Windows expects the BIOS time to be set to the local timezone. Which gives you at least an hour every year where you have no idea what time it is - because the clock goes back. Most people won't care because the clock goes back in the night, usually, but in the scenario mentioned of a 911 centre, time logging is really important. If you have to reboot a system in that limbo hour, it won't know which side of the line it is and you'll have to set the clock manually.
Unix just stores the BIOS time as UTC. You can configure Windows to do this too, but it isn't the default configuration, and therefore may have some kind of unpleasant side-effect, because all the code written for Windows assumes the broken behaviour instead.
Sometimes, there is no *good* open source alternative. I use them whenever possible (dansguardian, squid, clamav, etc) but it's just not always the answer. Not a popular opinion on /, but a reality nonetheless.
I hate sigs.
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.
Wrong.
When all you've got on your staff are wheelwrights, ostlers, and farriers, you just keep using the same horses and freight wagons. Well, you replace the horses when they get too old to pull their share of the load, and it's always nice to get a new wagon with brighter shinies every now and then.
But going to these new-fangled pickup trucks? Hiring mechanics to keep them running, and replacing the wooden wheels and horseshoes with these fancy pneumatic tyres? Oh, no sir, nosirree! The farriers would revolt for sure and start pitching horseshoes through the windows!
A lot of companies will stick with Windows to the bitter end. Easier to plan on five years of diminishing, but still adequate, profits and then shut the place down, than to go through the agony of replacing all the Windows expertise with this new-fangled expertise in Linux or BSD or Unix... and then there's this whole FOSS weirdness to contend with! Free software... how can that be? That makes as much sense as rolling the freight around on wheels made of air!
Will
Windows is required for gaming, nothing else.
Open an optometry practice on linux.
Your imaging instruments run on windows; the software to analyze corneal topography: windows only. The software to run the automated perimeter also windows only.
Now pick a Practice Management system; to manage your patients, scheduling, track patient records, and ideally it needs to support DICOM so it can receive data from the above instrumentation, and of course it should conform to HIPAA.
Finally, its also a small business, so you need some accounting, payroll.
Yeah, lets install linux. Only gamers requires windows.
I don't know what you do at work, but there are countless different types of business that require specialized software and tools and choosing linux is simply not possible.
Of all my clients, not one could simply switch to linux. They ALL run some software or other that is windows only. In most cases a subset of the environment could be converted to linux, but running a mixed environment isn't all that desireable.
If you're running into troubles like this constantly, it's probably because you give off the 'aura' of untrustrworthiness. We tend to say business people are ignorant, and they are, but geeks tend to jump on the latest bandwagon, then when things don't work, quit and find a better job.
The CEO is careful who he trusts to make serious technical decisions. He knows that he's the one who will suffer if your decision is bad, and that's why his arguments don't make sense: he doesn't want to tell you the real reason is he doesn't trust you at all.
I don't know what kind of mannerisms you have that make people think you are untrustworthy when it comes to technical decisions, but if you get it right, CxO type people will begin to trust you. Maybe you come across as too argumentative, or unserious. Or maybe it's somehow related to why your user-name is misspelled.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."