Microsoft Steeply Raising Enterprise Licensing Fees 571
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."
Does Microsoft have any friends? (Score:1, Insightful)
Someone I know raised this point. Is there anyone they haven't alienated? Customers, suppliers, ISVs, OEMs?
Ballmer needs the net profit (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Economic Geniuses (Score:5, Insightful)
I see: so if demand goes down, price goes up?
Good luck with that ...
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:great news for open source! (Score:2, Insightful)
I know this is where, traditionally, someone drops in to say, "companies don't much care about these costs because they represent such a small fraction of their IT budget", but at our small business, this actually hurts.
We're burdened with some aging Windows infrastructure, and nobody has a lot of spare change sitting around. Increased CAL pricing will have an effect on our decision making.
That said, I don't think this actually has anything to do with Surface, or likely even the early Win8 adoption rates.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Getting tough to support (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that was the point made in this story [semiaccurate.com]. 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.
Re:SharePoint is like a Swiss Army Gun (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This has nothing to do with Surface RT or Win8 (Score:4, Insightful)
Both have only been out for about a month. It's too early to really tell how either of them are doing. It also takes time to make decisions about pricing.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Economic Geniuses (Score:4, Insightful)
Could it be possible that he is shorting his own company's stock? I mean, he must be getting paid to drive the OS industry's equivalent of the Titanic into an iceberg; it's not possible for someone to remain so daft with so many of his customers screaming at the top of their lungs.
Re:Getting tough to support (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
In fairness, they have also developed (directly or via acquisitions) a lot of the best software on the market over an extended period, and for much of that time they have also invested a huge amount in supporting developers at other software companies whose products would therefore get built on Microsoft platforms. One could debate how successfully they still perform either of those roles today, but their dominant position didn't happen by accident, and I don't believe for a moment that it's entirely or even mostly down to the much criticised indiscretions that led to antitrust proceedings and the like either.
The thing is, while sticking with Microsoft platforms may bring benefits to businesses, sooner or later the cost will become too high and start to outweigh those benefits. Other things being equal, Microsoft still has the best software products in many of the markets it operates in, but other things aren't equal and apparently they're going to be even less equal now. On the other hand, maybe MS have done their homework, and rather than this being some sort of act of desperation, they have simply concluded that these products really are worth that much more than what they've been charging for them so far and by implication than any alternatives that might be available.
Re:Great news. (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. Short term, their customers will probably pay; long term, they'll quietly move away.
The people at MS will probably applaud the revenue increase, thinking to themselves "Why didn't we do this sooner?"
In a few years, they will be thinking instead "Ah, that's why we shouldn't have done that."
Ballmer is really dropping the ball here. All he needs to do now is announce that MS is getting out of the software business to pursue next year's Big Thing (the micro-tablet market), and MS will officially be done. It will rank up there with HP's announcement that they were considering selling off their hardware division, and will have business majors everywhere groan at the memory of it.
Re:How I read the summary... (Score:4, Insightful)
OSs are irrelevant. Cross platform everything is the bright future. There is no place for companies like Microsoft or their vendor lock-in strategies. They signed their own death warrant, it's only a matter of time now.
Re:Looking to implement SP (Score:3, Insightful)
There are all sorts of Wiki software available. Don't get me wrong. I am MicroSlut, just not logged in. I run SharePoint and wouldn't run anything else. Easy to use calendars, sites for each department, syncing with Outlook calendars, syncing with Outlook address books, exporting to excel, edit in spreadsheet mode, granular permissions control via active directory, integration with Dynamics, and, last but not least, using query files. Hell, my support ticket call center is on SharePoint. Authorized management can log in and see all support tickets, resolutions, reoccurring issues, top issues, and how many calls and how long they took per day to the beginning of the database. All this took me minutes to set up and I can mod it on the fly (add new fields and categories while on a support call). But this is Slashdot. That's why I asked what he needed it for. If he needs a simple Wiki, why use any license at all? Just go FOSS. When you need software, you don't Google "SharePoint alternatives", you search for what you need to do. Again, What does he need SharePoint for in the first place? I use it because I am there to administer it. If I wasn't available, it might be more expensive that other software (think upgrades and customization). I am a Microsoft shill, advocate, whore, whatever you want to call me (slut), but I am first a computer geek. Just because I prefer Microsoft software doesn't meant it is right for everyone else. I also run CentOS, just like everyone else :). I also doubt any small business owner could afford to pay my salary, so I doubt he has anyone who could easily setup SharePoint in such a short time, much less administer it (think SQL full vs. SQL Express). So I ask again... What does a small business owner need SharePoint for? Answer me that and I will supply a long list of alternatives, such as the shitload of services Google offers for free.
Short term gain (Score:4, Insightful)
I have said it before: MS is doing nothing to bring me back. I like MySQL better than SQL, Apache better than IIS, CentOS command line better than Server, Mac OS X better than any windows. I haven't used Visual Studio in long enough that I can't compare it to XCode. On my Mac I can run all my critical commercial software plus it mostly reacts like Linux so another strike against MS. I use my xbox for gaming and it smells like Linux might become a force in gaming (to be seen). I think that I am a pretty typical geek in that I have an xbox as my only MS product. Now most corporate types are on Windows but that is often because they have WidgetManager 2000 running on all their XP systems. I have even seen corporations that have to play all kinds of games to buy new machines and get XP onto them legally so that their old crap keeps working. Few of these companies have managed to make the Linux desktop transition for the first reason of legacy software but for the second reason of MS Office. I don't personally use it but in a corporate environment OpenOffice just doesn't cut it. But the moment some group gets together and ports the OpenOffice code to C++ awesomeness will happen. My favorite word program for Mac is Bean. It is C++ and rocket fast. It doesn't do much but that is a feature.
So looking at Microsoft as a tech professional I would never in a zillion years recommend that a new corporate system be based in the MS world and I suspect that there is a horde of non MS people making the same consistent recommendations to various companies. Many of these companies don't change because of inertia but one of the things that slows down an object moving by inertia is friction and this price increase will add to the MS friction. I doubt that there will be a huge wave of people vomiting out MS from their company due to this smallish increase. What there will be is a slight increase in the trend of people using non MS products. In the corporate world it is usually the negative trends that get you. People didn't stop using film overnight but Kodak couldn't get ahead of the trend and Kodak basically invented the digital point and shoot.
I don't hate MS but it gives me zero reason to love it yet I remember the days when I did. Visual Basic (before
Does not mean much (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:3, Insightful)
Around 2007, Microsoft realised tech sites like Slashdot had a significant involvement ... mostly marketers and sock-puppets now.
According to marketing, you have to repeat this message 7 times and people start to believe it. Of course variation in poster name and phrasing is a plus.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, as much of a Linux guy as I am, I realize that it doesn't run Exchange very well. Nor Microsoft SQL.
It's also not terribly good at being an AD domain, even though Samba is very close to being out of testing on that. There is a server-world for Windows, as much as we may hate to think about it. We aren't talking about desktop only, in the Enterprise.
Re:Stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
Gold will flow from springs, mana will pour from heaven and pigs will learn to levitate. Google's customer service is fucking appalling* for just about all its services; you'd have to be smoking some heavy duty crack to think any desktop release they'll do would look anything like that, as would the people who modded it up.
*Said as a massive Google product fan; they power most of what I do in terms of hardware and software.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:4, Insightful)
And why would it?
Sure you can't run MSSQL on Linux, but you can run Postgres, MySQL, Oracle and DB2 just fine...
Sure you can't run exchange, but there are plenty of alternatives many of which are a lot better.
And an AD domain is only of any use if you have lots of windows machines, and even then its a security nightmare.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ballmer needs the net profit (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not at all a fan of MS, but what you say makes sense and is reasonable to me. I don't understand why you've been modded down - if I had points left I'd mod you up.
Maybe the sock-puppets and astro-turfers - and the shills on BOTH sides of the Win/Lin divide - modded you down 'cause you're obviously not among the faithful.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:3, Insightful)
You are confusing two different things and trying to conflate them to support your ridiculous assertion. Microsoft's competitor's products can both be superior and be too expensive to switch to at the same time. The latter doesn't preclude the former in any way. Being expensive doesn't make something intrinsically better or worse. As a matter of fact, the two concepts, at least in the IT field tend to be quite orthogonal.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure you can't run exchange, but there are plenty of alternatives many of which are a lot better.
Name one. Just one.
Re:SharePoint is like a Swiss Army Gun (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a reason that MS markets to PHBs and not to IT ya know...
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:4, Insightful)
I always wonder if people really are so delusional that they actually believe Slashdot has and merits this kind of value and attention (big companies bothering to pay people to post here?? yeah, right..), or if it is just an easy way of dismissing dissenting views.
It's not a question of dissenting views, the fact is that there has been a recent pattern of brand-new users jumping in at the top of the thread and praising Microsoft or some similar entity. The most blatant ones were the Visual Studio spam, but there have been a lot of similar ones. Now I suppose it might just be a particularly dedicated troll, but it has to be said, it looked a hell of a lot like a fairly clever PR drive - I probably wouldn't have noticed had it been done more sparingly, it was the fact that there were so many of them that made them look suspicious.
The other thing is that you're arguing that Slashdot is being singled out. If I were trying to seed opinion I'd cover a range of them. Personally, I only regularly check Slashdot and the Reg to get my tech news fix so I'm not in a position to comment.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Insightful)
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!!!
Re:Getting tough to support (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:2, Insightful)
You know, that's not a windows or a microsoft problem, that's a "Insert your company name here" problem.
Seriously, where I work (IT department) we work to make a user's life easier. We try to get them up to date, test the stuff they need, install it. Cater to their every wishes as best as we can.
Your company sounds like the IT department is doing direct battle with the other departments.
Then pay the increase (Score:2, Insightful)
The pay the increase and keep telling yourself, the whipping feels good and helps you lead a more productive life.
I have no use for the opinions of a slave or cow myself. Go sell your story to a MS rep, you might get a special discount if he can tell it to other cows.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a free market...with barriers (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure you can't run exchange, but there are plenty of alternatives many of which are a lot better.
Name one. Just one.
I was going to ask the same. People who say there are plenty of alternatives to Exchange have ususally not seen how it is used in large (even many medium sized) organizations, and think of it only as a simple email server. The closest thing out there is probably a well built out and managed IBM/Lotus Notes implementation, but I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy (I went from a multinational corporation using Notes to a multinational corporation using Exchange, oh god what a relief).
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:4, Insightful)
All together you can gain the same functionality running a multitude of packages. It's not going to have the pretty UI, but the upside is you don't have to rebuild your corrupted mail store every couple of months.
Have you ever run Exchange? Or are you just repeating the same tired bullshit that used to be bandied about 10 years ago? We've been running it for 10 years. Not once have we had to rebuild a mail store. If you're going to take a pot shot at it, at least try something a bit more up to date.
The sad thing is most people that haven't used Exchange just see it as a mail server. It's not. If they understood that better, they might understand why there are no viable alternatives.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:4, Insightful)