You do if you are a real customer i.e. someone who can buy enterprise IT. Your agent can take you on a tour of the data centers your cloud provider uses and show you the physical layer. You can get a very accurate description of the software protections. If you buy your own direct connection you network provider will walk you through the network. If you want a cloud on your premise you can do that. Etc..
Why use backup tapes? Just use 3x redundancy and have files that are semi-stable replicate off the network.
Anyway.... that file copy issues sounds weird. Obvious the distance is adding latency, but if copies of reasonable files are taking 15 minutes there is just nowhere near enough bandwidth or you have a bad configuration problem. Assuming it is not bandwidth the operation is halting too often?
Would anyone in your company be interested in a free assessment?
Understood. But its worth figuring out what the MDM is for. What are they guarding against? If there aren't assets what are they worried about being lost on mobiles? The additional cost of managing security is not low.
Every major corporate network does not run Outlook. I've worked with enterprises that use in house solutions. There are corporations on Google. I've worked with many major corporations that use Lotus Notes example BTI. Texas Instruments uses Zimbra which is a major corporation. Novell Groupwise is used by corporations. Mirapoint & CriticalPath are still in use and migrating their customers not to Outlook / Exchange but to Open-Exchange. I know several hospitals that were on Scalix up till a few years ago.
2013 articles are about a Knox1. They are also bunk. Knox provides the critical hardware components. The MDM provides the rest. Knox isn't meant to be a complete solution. The vulnerabilities are much further up the stack.
Well at that number. I'd think you could be at something like $5/user/mo pretty easily and if you hunt more like $3/user/mo. What kinds of bids are you seeing?
The news isn't the apps. The news is that the IBM/Apple partnership has progressed into a 2nd meaningful release. That being said, these apps are probably going to be distributed internally or via. IBM's substores for customers. For example I know they run United Airlines internal application repository.
They might, but DEC and SUN were totally appropriate for/. years ago too (well actually DEC was bought before/. existed, but regardless they would have been appropriate and HP now is). IBM did just short of $100b in revenues last year. So in the meanwhile before they die, they are news.
I certainly agree with you about CAPEX vs. OPEX issues. Software since it continually improves should be a CAPEX expense. For companies that just want to shift when they pay what around, that's the financing company's job. There shouldn't be a "buying an OS" option. That's what Microsoft needs to change. They need to educate their customer base that the computer is like the TV and software the shows. Paying for the TV doesn't get you HBO.
So I agree with you many customers don't think that way. But that's what a subscription would change. They would start to think that way. As for your "Do we really need to spend $600 this year". Exactly the problem. That's what's been killing Microsoft that the expense is deferrable. That's why the subscription model makes more sense it makes the expense non deferrable. You don't pay for cable your TV just sits there.
but it's something directly involved with making the hardware that they bought functional at all.
Just like there is free shows for you TV. You can still stream youtube or connect it to a DVR even if you don't buy cable. In the case of OSes there are free OSes. Dell for example does sell computers with no operating system.
As for the cost of hardware. Microsoft could bundle the hardware costs in with the subscription, so the customer doesn't have to "buy the computer". That also makes sense for Microsoft in that they can force hardware changes through the ecosystem much faster if companies can't defer their hardware expenses. So if that's the holdup I'd go in the other direction for desktops. I really don't see any reason for small business to be owning their hardware anyway. You seem to agree with the lease model, and of course Microsoft partners, like Dell could sell the Microsoft subscription as part of the leasing costs of the computer.
It seems to me that part of the problem Microsoft runs into is, people will buy Windows XP and then stick with it for 10 years because they don't want to pay $250 per computer to upgrade to the next version, only to know that they're supposed to spend $250 in a couple years for the next version.
There is that group. Which if you think about it, is a group reluctant to spend. They have to separate the unwilling to spend group from the cheapskates. By losing the unwilling to spend customers they can drive the spending of the cheapskates up.
In terms though of enterprise it isn't the $250 they could care less. It is the time and focus required for upgrading the hundreds of speciality applications. What Microsoft needs to do is create a situation where upgrading of applications is part of what companies expect to be doing regularly. They are constantly upgrading everything, probably mostly by subscribing to a service basket administered by the Azure team. Right now though companies don't have this large fixed nut hitting their books. They can defer IT expenses. That's what Microsoft would I suspect aim to eliminate. Toda application X costs $20k / user, upgrades are $3k / yr. Sometimes the company skips for years and saves the $3k. Under the new scheme application X costs $400 / mo / user and there is no way to skip and keep using it. Or even better application X with a full range of rich support services costs $750 / mo / user and they essentially outsource the internal labor support to an Azure partner. That creates a rich ecosystem infrastructure that is well funded.
What doesn't work for me, however, is the idea of an operating system that stops working if you stop paying the subscription. I couldn't, in good conscience, recommend that to a client.
Why? Because the spending would be mandatory? Their heat stops working if they don't keep paying. They have to pay their rent. They have to pay their employees regularly or they stop working... Companies are used to reoccurring costs. Besides via. financing a subscription can be turned into a capital expense. So for example is the subscription is $100 / year. Microsoft could do something like $2k for a lifetime subscription seat, which they would buy back at any time for the current cost of a subscription (i.e. you pay $2k use it for a 15 years and then sell it for $4k back to Microsoft). If not an intermediary financing company would do something like that.
I support Macs and PCs, and I suspect that if your business can go with Macs, the TCO may be lower. Of course, that depends on things like user training, what kinds of systems your IT department is familiar with, and what kinds of functionality you need from your computer. Yes, you're going to spend at least $1000 for a laptop and at least $600 for a desktop, but I wouldn't generally recommend businesses buy those cheapo $300 desktop/ $700 laptops anyway. You'll spend more money supporting them than you save buying them.
My company (I own) is a Mac company. That being said, there are a ton of vertical applications for Windows that just don't exist for Mac. I like Mac for small business. Employees do more with their Macs because of the focus in the ecosystem on ease of use. For many enterprises the vertical application availability is too big a hurdle. So I tend to have the reverse opinion.
I do agree with you that the cheapskates are often pennywise pound foolish which is yet another reason that Microsoft should be running their ecosystem more closely.
since there really is only one product in the Enterprise email/calendar/collaboration space worth a damn
Come on. There are many products that handle email/calendar/collaboration which are better than Outlook. Outlook is a very good standard and rather feature rich for an email client. It is designed to work well with a popular enterprise email solution. But it is far from the richest solution and further still from the only solution. There is even a fairly good solution which is rather close to Outlook feature wise which is open source from VMWare: http://www.zimbra.com/
I agree with what you wrote above. And I say this as a long term Apple fan, but Samsung Knox + good MDM IMHO is probably ahead of Apple + good MDM in terms of security. So while it is true you need 3rd party tools you can at this point secure an Android (Samsung only though) much better than you can an Apple device.
Exactly. Microsoft has since XP been very good about not forcing through upgrades. They used to do Office features that were backwards incompatible. Given the richness (and the complexity) of the Azure / ShareFile infrastructure it certainly would not be hard to do that again. And of course those new versions of Office would need the new version of Windows, as would Azure features... IMHO if they want to force the upgrade they can force the upgrade.
As far as Mac... I don't see how Mac solves the problem of forced upgrades. Apple is far more aggressive about forced upgrades. Now the upgrades are free, but given the higher applications prices and hardware prices the cost of ownership on Apple products is much higher than for Windows products. Windows has cheapskate customers, and they won't like subscriptions. While Microsoft wants to push the cheapskates to spend more Apple simply won't tolerate cheapskate customers. Their stuff is unapologetically not the low cost items. So I don't see how Mac solves the "I don't want to spend money" problem.
Android / iOS / Linux of course could win cheapskate market. Arguably the reason Microsoft backed off from their plan with Longhorn to force an expensive upgrade was their fear of allowing Linux to gain a foothold in desktop. But today Android and iOS have a strong foothold. They can't avoid something that's already happened.
So I think the situation is different. Ultimately most of those customers will be unhappy initially but they won't have an alternative. Then as they spend more in the aggregate the advantages of a well funded ecosystem will become apparent and while they still won't like spending the money, I suspect they will be happier in the end.
OK so nothing changes for you. Which is what I suspect. Most business in 2014 are pretty locked in. Microsoft has room to raise prices and drive up the quality of the Windows ecosystem. Customers won't like the increased price of course but they won't dislike it enough to leave.
The upgrade was before XP came out, not after. It was the migration from 2000. I do agree they probably lost customers from subscription though I don't have the data.
It was a disaster to move to subscriptions when people got one upgrade and then: a) It took forever to bring out Longhorn b) They abandoned Longhorn and moved to the much smaller upgrade of Vista c) The Vista upgrade was still problematic.
Probably did turn people off. That being said, had they not offered the option...
Just to be clear, I was talking about graphics professionals there: people who design things like user interface themes and web graphics as their primary role have told me they prefer some of these newer tools to working with Photoshop for the same jobs.
That makes sense. Photoshop isn't the right Adobe product to begin with for UI design. Which is what you were saying. I agree that graphics people have overused Photoshop where Flex, Fireworks... would have been better tools regardless.
Creative cloud by offering everything will hopefully fix some of that regardless of whether people move to cheaper tools. Of course once they learn that Photoshop isn't the right tool maybe that encourages the move to a one time $30-200 tool.
You would then have companies that had a 50/50 hiring policy with 50% being low end jobs for Americans and 50% being higher end jobs for H1Bs. There are enough janitors, restaurant staff, retail staff.... to allow for effectively infinite IT hires. And even if you required IT that means the domestic workforce gets stuff like helpdesk or call answering.
The tax works well with maximizing profit. If the company can get an H1B for less than 66% of the cost of domestic then fine, they pay a large tax and we get the benefits from the high rate of taxation. The Indian companies don't need to be complaint, blatantly cheating the tax systems gets the Americans involved tossed in jail.
Yes well the 3 days matters. Your agreement had expired. Standard is something like 6-24 months after payment stops the agreement terminates. It also usually hits the company as well not just the contractor.
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You do if you are a real customer i.e. someone who can buy enterprise IT. Your agent can take you on a tour of the data centers your cloud provider uses and show you the physical layer. You can get a very accurate description of the software protections. If you buy your own direct connection you network provider will walk you through the network. If you want a cloud on your premise you can do that. Etc..
There are cloud solutions for any level of security you need. Security varies. Heck Lockheed Martin has a cloud.
Why use backup tapes? Just use 3x redundancy and have files that are semi-stable replicate off the network.
Anyway.... that file copy issues sounds weird. Obvious the distance is adding latency, but if copies of reasonable files are taking 15 minutes there is just nowhere near enough bandwidth or you have a bad configuration problem. Assuming it is not bandwidth the operation is halting too often?
Would anyone in your company be interested in a free assessment?
Understood. But its worth figuring out what the MDM is for. What are they guarding against? If there aren't assets what are they worried about being lost on mobiles? The additional cost of managing security is not low.
Every major corporate network does not run Outlook. I've worked with enterprises that use in house solutions. There are corporations on Google. I've worked with many major corporations that use Lotus Notes example BTI. Texas Instruments uses Zimbra which is a major corporation. Novell Groupwise is used by corporations. Mirapoint & CriticalPath are still in use and migrating their customers not to Outlook / Exchange but to Open-Exchange. I know several hospitals that were on Scalix up till a few years ago.
You are simply wrong on the facts.
Well if you want free not cheap, then why care about cheap? Anyway Google free MDMs there are some out there.
Though as an aside if you are broke its hard to see what you are worried about losing in the case of a data breach.
2013 articles are about a Knox1. They are also bunk. Knox provides the critical hardware components. The MDM provides the rest. Knox isn't meant to be a complete solution. The vulnerabilities are much further up the stack.
Well at that number. I'd think you could be at something like $5/user/mo pretty easily and if you hunt more like $3/user/mo. What kinds of bids are you seeing?
The news isn't the apps. The news is that the IBM/Apple partnership has progressed into a 2nd meaningful release. That being said, these apps are probably going to be distributed internally or via. IBM's substores for customers. For example I know they run United Airlines internal application repository.
How many users are you talking?
They might, but DEC and SUN were totally appropriate for /. years ago too (well actually DEC was bought before /. existed, but regardless they would have been appropriate and HP now is). IBM did just short of $100b in revenues last year. So in the meanwhile before they die, they are news.
I certainly agree with you about CAPEX vs. OPEX issues. Software since it continually improves should be a CAPEX expense. For companies that just want to shift when they pay what around, that's the financing company's job. There shouldn't be a "buying an OS" option. That's what Microsoft needs to change. They need to educate their customer base that the computer is like the TV and software the shows. Paying for the TV doesn't get you HBO.
So I agree with you many customers don't think that way. But that's what a subscription would change. They would start to think that way. As for your "Do we really need to spend $600 this year". Exactly the problem. That's what's been killing Microsoft that the expense is deferrable. That's why the subscription model makes more sense it makes the expense non deferrable. You don't pay for cable your TV just sits there.
Just like there is free shows for you TV. You can still stream youtube or connect it to a DVR even if you don't buy cable. In the case of OSes there are free OSes. Dell for example does sell computers with no operating system.
As for the cost of hardware. Microsoft could bundle the hardware costs in with the subscription, so the customer doesn't have to "buy the computer". That also makes sense for Microsoft in that they can force hardware changes through the ecosystem much faster if companies can't defer their hardware expenses. So if that's the holdup I'd go in the other direction for desktops. I really don't see any reason for small business to be owning their hardware anyway. You seem to agree with the lease model, and of course Microsoft partners, like Dell could sell the Microsoft subscription as part of the leasing costs of the computer.
There is that group. Which if you think about it, is a group reluctant to spend. They have to separate the unwilling to spend group from the cheapskates. By losing the unwilling to spend customers they can drive the spending of the cheapskates up.
In terms though of enterprise it isn't the $250 they could care less. It is the time and focus required for upgrading the hundreds of speciality applications. What Microsoft needs to do is create a situation where upgrading of applications is part of what companies expect to be doing regularly. They are constantly upgrading everything, probably mostly by subscribing to a service basket administered by the Azure team. Right now though companies don't have this large fixed nut hitting their books. They can defer IT expenses. That's what Microsoft would I suspect aim to eliminate. Toda application X costs $20k / user, upgrades are $3k / yr. Sometimes the company skips for years and saves the $3k. Under the new scheme application X costs $400 / mo / user and there is no way to skip and keep using it. Or even better application X with a full range of rich support services costs $750 / mo / user and they essentially outsource the internal labor support to an Azure partner. That creates a rich ecosystem infrastructure that is well funded.
Why? Because the spending would be mandatory? Their heat stops working if they don't keep paying. They have to pay their rent. They have to pay their employees regularly or they stop working... Companies are used to reoccurring costs. Besides via. financing a subscription can be turned into a capital expense. So for example is the subscription is $100 / year. Microsoft could do something like $2k for a lifetime subscription seat, which they would buy back at any time for the current cost of a subscription (i.e. you pay $2k use it for a 15 years and then sell it for $4k back to Microsoft). If not an intermediary financing company would do something like that.
My company (I own) is a Mac company. That being said, there are a ton of vertical applications for Windows that just don't exist for Mac. I like Mac for small business. Employees do more with their Macs because of the focus in the ecosystem on ease of use. For many enterprises the vertical application availability is too big a hurdle. So I tend to have the reverse opinion.
I do agree with you that the cheapskates are often pennywise pound foolish which is yet another reason that Microsoft should be running their ecosystem more closely.
Come on. There are many products that handle email/calendar/collaboration which are better than Outlook. Outlook is a very good standard and rather feature rich for an email client. It is designed to work well with a popular enterprise email solution. But it is far from the richest solution and further still from the only solution. There is even a fairly good solution which is rather close to Outlook feature wise which is open source from VMWare: http://www.zimbra.com/
IBM bought a whole company for that: http://www.maas360.com/
They also resell arguably the most professional MDM management suite out there: http://www.voxmobile.com/
Who cares? This is a computer news site. Since when is IBM's activities not legitimate news?
I agree with what you wrote above. And I say this as a long term Apple fan, but Samsung Knox + good MDM IMHO is probably ahead of Apple + good MDM in terms of security. So while it is true you need 3rd party tools you can at this point secure an Android (Samsung only though) much better than you can an Apple device.
Exactly. Microsoft has since XP been very good about not forcing through upgrades. They used to do Office features that were backwards incompatible. Given the richness (and the complexity) of the Azure / ShareFile infrastructure it certainly would not be hard to do that again. And of course those new versions of Office would need the new version of Windows, as would Azure features... IMHO if they want to force the upgrade they can force the upgrade.
As far as Mac... I don't see how Mac solves the problem of forced upgrades. Apple is far more aggressive about forced upgrades. Now the upgrades are free, but given the higher applications prices and hardware prices the cost of ownership on Apple products is much higher than for Windows products. Windows has cheapskate customers, and they won't like subscriptions. While Microsoft wants to push the cheapskates to spend more Apple simply won't tolerate cheapskate customers. Their stuff is unapologetically not the low cost items. So I don't see how Mac solves the "I don't want to spend money" problem.
Android / iOS / Linux of course could win cheapskate market. Arguably the reason Microsoft backed off from their plan with Longhorn to force an expensive upgrade was their fear of allowing Linux to gain a foothold in desktop. But today Android and iOS have a strong foothold. They can't avoid something that's already happened.
So I think the situation is different. Ultimately most of those customers will be unhappy initially but they won't have an alternative. Then as they spend more in the aggregate the advantages of a well funded ecosystem will become apparent and while they still won't like spending the money, I suspect they will be happier in the end.
OK so nothing changes for you. Which is what I suspect. Most business in 2014 are pretty locked in. Microsoft has room to raise prices and drive up the quality of the Windows ecosystem. Customers won't like the increased price of course but they won't dislike it enough to leave.
The upgrade was before XP came out, not after. It was the migration from 2000. I do agree they probably lost customers from subscription though I don't have the data.
It was a disaster to move to subscriptions when people got one upgrade and then:
a) It took forever to bring out Longhorn
b) They abandoned Longhorn and moved to the much smaller upgrade of Vista
c) The Vista upgrade was still problematic.
Probably did turn people off. That being said, had they not offered the option...
That makes sense. Photoshop isn't the right Adobe product to begin with for UI design. Which is what you were saying. I agree that graphics people have overused Photoshop where Flex, Fireworks... would have been better tools regardless.
Creative cloud by offering everything will hopefully fix some of that regardless of whether people move to cheaper tools. Of course once they learn that Photoshop isn't the right tool maybe that encourages the move to a one time $30-200 tool.
You would then have companies that had a 50/50 hiring policy with 50% being low end jobs for Americans and 50% being higher end jobs for H1Bs. There are enough janitors, restaurant staff, retail staff.... to allow for effectively infinite IT hires. And even if you required IT that means the domestic workforce gets stuff like helpdesk or call answering.
Sorry I meant R. A was a legacy from the previous version but I was using C (now T) to mean two different things. Sorry for the confusion.
The tax works well with maximizing profit. If the company can get an H1B for less than 66% of the cost of domestic then fine, they pay a large tax and we get the benefits from the high rate of taxation. The Indian companies don't need to be complaint, blatantly cheating the tax systems gets the Americans involved tossed in jail.
Yes well the 3 days matters. Your agreement had expired. Standard is something like 6-24 months after payment stops the agreement terminates. It also usually hits the company as well not just the contractor.