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Microsoft Will Squeeze Datacenters On Price of Windows Server
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft plans to raise the price of the Datacenter edition of the upcoming R2 release of Windows Server 2012 by 28 percent, adding to what analysts call a record number of price increases for enterprise software products from Redmond. According to licensing data sheets available for download from the Windows Server 2012 R2 Website (PDF), the price of a single license of Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter will be $6,155, compared to $4,809 today—plus the cost of a Client Access Licenses for every user or device connecting to the server. News of the increase was posted yesterday by datacenter virtualization and security specialist Aidan Finn, a six-time Microsoft MVP who works for Dublin-based value added reseller MicroWarehouse Ltd. and has done work for clients including Amdahl, Fujitsu and Barclays. The increase caps off a year filled with a record number of price increases for Microsoft enterprise software, according to a Tweet yesterday from Microsoft software licensing analyst Paul DeGroot of Pica Communications."
RedHat should see a nice increase in business because of this.
What is the gain for this pain? From a business standpoint, I would want to know what R2 delivers that would necessitate a price increase. If there isn't much then this makes it hard sell for businesses: "We get to pay more for no reason!"
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yep, and I wonder what the prices would be if there were no Linux or BSDs, and people had to choose between MS, solaris, some other flavours of unix, OSX.
Free software helps even those not adopting it.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Wall street doesn't love Microsoft because its business model for the last dozen years ago is about squeezing increasing license fees out of locked in customers. Nobody is under any illusion about where that leads.
Knowing that, Microsoft has been desperately thrashing about trying to find some new market into which it can extend its monopoly. Arguably, the biggest single factor in forestalling Microsoft's boundless ambition was Mozilla, which ended Microsoft's dreams of becoming gatekeeper to the internet. Then Apple killed Microsoft's hopes in the phone market and Sony refused to concede the high end console market. Next sea change is, the corporate workplace moves to the cloud and Microsoft isn't invited to the party.
Last year's flurry of new product hype was just comical. Microsoft got the benefit of the doubt that time. They shot their wad, next manic outbreak of product announcements will get exactly zero cred.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Are they insane? Six grand for a server OS that literally can be replicated with any Linux distribution and a few things like SAMBA, Rsnapshot, etc? So long as it LOOKS like a Windows server to the user community, they don't care.
I take it you have not seen an Oracle License for Solaris have you?
They go for up to $100,000 as the database is part of the deal whether you need it or not!
$6,000 is laughable cheap as the real cost comes when Samba doesn't work for a 3,000 user environment where shit wont break because of a Windows Update to the clients or if you need virtualization.
VSPhere last time I looked was $8000+. So $6,000 is -$2000 less than debian plus VSPhere to run your virtual machines believe it or not. Dynamic I/o that moves the requests to the least uitilized SAN/volume means hardware savings too and Linux (outside of IBM's flavor) still does not have this.
The enteprise is totally different than the desktop world.
http://saveie6.com/
GP is absolutely right in what they said.
You try to LOSE money in an expanding market. More on that later. The problem is, Microsoft isn't in an expanding market. Google an Apple are. Microsoft isn't really in that market, the mobile market.
In an expanding market, especially a market where critical mass is so important (think app stores), it's all about market share during the time when the market is doubling every year or so. Remember the search engine wars? There were seven major search engines. The largest was HotBot (Inktomi). Guess how much Hotbot, AltaVista, and Excite have made in the last five years? Google is making billions per quarter because they got controlling market share while the total market was tens of milllions. To get that critical market share during the growth phase, the right move is to spend as much as you can on to gain more market share. If you turned a profit, those profit dollars are dollars you should have spent on marketing, expanding production, or otherwise growing your market share.
But again, though his statement is true, it doesn't apply to Microsoft, unless they actually want to get into mobile. If they want to be a significant player in mobile, they should have spent another $400 million developing something that could compete. That would be a $400M "loss", in exchange for a shot to remain relevant in the consumer market.