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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.
it's almost as if you're trying to get people to use something else.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Datacentre allows unlimited virtualization and consolidation ratios are climbing.
We run around 300 Windows VMs on 16 CPUs, that was a major saving over Windows Server Enterprise Licenses.
Still, the pain.
Jason.
I must, I must increase my going bust
They've got to pay for all of those Slates they have stuck in the warehouse.
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
These dramatic price hikes look like Microsoft is working to stem the tide of massive losses with increased revenue in their core product domains. They are running out of options as each new offering falls flat on its face over and over again. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some significant trimming of "non-essential" personnel in the next few years to further boost the quarterly profits.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Princess Leia: Governor Balmer, I should have expected to find you holding Gates' leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board.
Governor Balmer: Charming to the last. You don't know how hard I found it, signing the order to terminate your license.
Princess Leia: I'm surprised that you had the courage to take the responsibility yourself.
Governor Balmer: Princess Leia, before your execution, I'd like you to join me for a ceremony that will make this game console operational. No IT department will dare oppose the Emperor now.
Princess Leia: The more you tighten your grip, Balmer, the more data centers will slip through your fingers.
Governor Balmer: Not after we demonstrate the capabilities of Windows 8!
We just left Red Hat - converted the entire datacenter from an OpenLDAP/samba infrastructure on Red Hat 5 & 5 to an AD/windows environment - because Red Hat couldn't (or more acurately wouldn't) meet Microsoft's pricing. The fact that HyperV proved to be fantastically more stable and capable than RHEVM (and RHEVM had Active Directory dependencies) didn't help the situation any, but it was price discrepancy that really did it.
We had to replace hardware anyway, so we priced out new software while we were at it. Microsoft won on value for the dollar, crushing Red Hat (and also VMware). I personally prefer Open Source so I'm kind of bitter about it, but I had to do what was best for the company in order to keep our staff gainfully employed. That's what companies are for, to support people.
My licensing costs. Let's see:
CentOS 6 - $0.00
Apache - $0.00
MariaDB - $0.00
PHP - $0.00
GNU C++ - $0.00
TOTAL -- $0.00
Plus number of hours spent auditing licensing: ZERO
Now let's look at my development tools:XCode, SSH, Firefox, Chrome, VIM, and the command line. For an additional zero dollars.
But the best bit is that even if MS said, "Dude you are so wonderful that we will now give you an unlimited license to every product we have completely for free for life." I wouldn't even crack the film wrap on the packaging. It is not out of some religious hatred of MS but that the products I use match my needs perfectly. So for me at least to switch back to MS would be to make my products and productivity worse.
Sure, it looks expensive, but Microsoft is throwing in a Surface RT I believe.
Woot!
Duck!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The license fees for running Linux have effectively doubled every year since it came out.
There is a significant install base of Windows in datacenters? Who knew...
Every fortune 500 company?
Once you get away from internet and other tech companies, Windows has a *huge* back office presence.
Once you make the investment into Windows to run your back office, there's not much incremental cost to add servers here and there to do other things, it's not worth the investment to switch to Linux for a few servers, and then as "a few servers here and there" grow to hundreds of servers running mission critical tasks, it's even harder to move away from Windows. Microsoft is good at lock-in -- their products work well (mostly) with each other, but poorly with everyone else. So once you move down the Windows path you get more and more ingrained in it. And, just like there are plenty of Linux zealots, there are plenty of Windows zealots that are firmly convinced that Microsoft is the One True Way to get things done in the corporate world - and of course, much of the software that you companies use to use to run their business only runs on Windows.
Who says it is MS CRM or whatever?
Fact of the matter I.T.is there to help them do business. Nothing more and nothing less. They do not care about freedom or what someone says on slashdot. They use software that is made for Windows only to do this. Just because it runs on Windows does not mean it is crap.
It has been said a million times people do not want to be free of Microsoft. Slashdotters who have not run Windows in a decade are unaware it is not based on DOS anymore. It doesn't crash. It is not buggy anymore. It works. Maybe there is no other peice of software that works for thier niche set of processes that is available on Unix? Maybe the CEO had a round of golf with the sales person and no platform was discussed when they shook hands on it with a beer later?
In many ways Linux is not favorable to the average person who sees no need to free themselves?
Linux does not even have a stable ABI which means an update can break ATI drivers. It is not a good desktop OS for this reason as Hairyfeet has mentioned he tried selling Linux boxen. Customers always return them when an update breaks something or a printer doesn't work. Since Windows has an ABI it means a driver or piece of software will work between versions! Unix has it but Linux does not as it would encourage people to write binary blobs ... oh the horrors.
I favor FreeBSD for this reason but you need an expensive Redhat certified system because of the driver issue and them working with the server vendor so you save little if anything anyway. Add VSphere to the mix and it is more expensive than Windows Data center on the same hardware if you want to run virtual machines.
Office and Photoshop work. SAP works. That VBA macro for Excel and Access that Bob wrote in Finance that is now a central business process that makes money works! You cost money as a cost center.
Now who do you think the big boss will listen too? Bob that wrote that VBA macro/SAP salesperson that generated 3 million dollars, or some nerd who recites things from RMS who costs $60,000 a year? Your ass will be shown the door. Simple.
I used to be like you but man the real world is different than my Moms place and college where I played with Linux and FreeBSD. Money is money and whatever helps generate it with the least hassle wins and of course politics if you want job security.
http://saveie6.com/
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/
Hello,
While raising the price on an enterprise product is a good way to boost short-term revenue, it seems to me that companies might begin to seek less expensive alternatives. In this case, though, that might not be Linux at all.
I haven't seen any mention of this so far, but I have to wonder if the price increase might be an attempt to make enterprises look at Windows Azure as an alternative to continuing to run their own datacenters.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
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.
Does anyone, anywhere actually like their ERP system? *boggle* The point is, server licensing is a small piece of the pie, and stuff like ERP retraining cost would be a rather larger piece.
Just in general, if your IT works well enough that it's not a major source of pain for whatever your business actually does, it's very hard to justify any sort of major change. That's why 1970s mainframe software was still quite popular until the Y2K costs hit - it may not be perfect, but it's OK and we're used to it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.