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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
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!
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.
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.