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."
How to treat a loyal customer (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft method: Milk them for every cent.
Linux method: Free is free. Nobody can hold a gun to your head under the GPL.
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Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Informative)
It's strong-arming if you vendor lock a customer than steeply raise rates.
blah blah free market blah blah still an adversarial dick move.
Not merely a dick move, but illegal under the Sherman and Clayton [justice.gov] antitrust acts.
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.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Funny)
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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: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: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:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:4, Funny)
Lotus Notes? [ihatelotusnotes.com]
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Informative)
Zimbra. To a large extent, it's a drop in Exchange replacement which will plug straight into an existing AD environment if you so wish.
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Angry Birds.
Exchange is just what managers dick around with when they don't want to do any actual work, right?
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Informative)
Zarafa! I have migrated two companies now. Works exceptionally well. It uses outlook, so end users don't even realize they are not on exchange anymore. (course, webmail, or any imap/ical client work as well)
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Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Informative)
Here's two: Citadel [citadel.org] and Kolab [kolab.org]
Among other things, Kolab is a product of a series of contracts for the federal office for Security in the Information Technology in the German Government, though both are quite secure.
Then there are two more: OpenGroupware [opengroupware.org] and Zimbra [zimbra.com]. Module options are out there. If you're not finding them, then it's because you are not looking.
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:4, Interesting)
If you're not tryign them, you're not really looking.
OpenGroupware is a nonstarter.
Zimbra is pay-for-premium features, with prices similar to hosted Exchange. http://www.zimbra.com/products/pricing.html [zimbra.com]. Zafara has a similar model. http://www.zarafa.com/zarafa-calculator/en [zarafa.com]
I don't mind paying, but I don't want to pay the same for a work-alike drop in replacement from a small company when Microsoft's *hosted* solution is price-competitive.
Citadel is okay. But IMHO, not comperable to Exchange.
Kolab is on my list of things to try out, but I'm not optimistic. It seems that stable Outlook connectors are proprietary and cost $13.95/seat or $60/year depending on who you buy them from. Otherwise lots of alpha and beta clients http://www.kolab.org/clients [kolab.org]
Dollar for dollar, none of these have any advantages over Exchange. Kolab has promise, it doesn't pretend to be an Exchange drop-in replacement, but a FOSS stack alternative. Are you using it in production?
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Informative)
Try and find an enterprise grade accounting/erp system for a 20-200 person company that doesn't rely on Windows. There are some GPL projects, but they are far from the same level of completeness.
We will likely switch from gmail to Exchange (at a mere 30 people) due to limits of Google's systems and the costs to overcome them. You can get about halfway there with Linux for about half the cost.
You can cobble together systems with GPL solutions, but the dollar cost ends up being in-line with MS stuff once you need more than 40 hours to install and configure. Samba, Asterisk, backups, LAMP are all easy to justify going Linux, but I have not had much luck justifying more complex projects going that route.
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It's not hard for MS products to work better on Windows, now is it?
Especially when MS has been known to go out of their way to make things harder for competing OSes to support their products.
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, Funny)
One license to hold them, and in the darkness bind them!
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Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Interesting)
vendor lock in? try version lock in...
We are still using XP and Office 2003 at my work on the standard desktop build as the cost of switching up and migrating legacy stuff (Office/vba and some very old in-house 16 bit/windows 3.1 era programs) is too high
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:4, Interesting)
You can get Windows 7 at my place of work when your computer is due for replacement ... so far, we've all opted to keep XP, because ICT have decided to leverage the new features of 7 to prevent people running any software that isn't on the "Approved" list. To get software on the "Approved" list if it isn't already, it costs about three weeks of my wages. We did a quick audit in development, and decided that the $250,000 of "approval" costs we'd have to pay to get all the extra packages we use to do our day jobs wasn't worth the switch to the new OS.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:5, Informative)
No, it means the switching costs are high. Which can be the case even if you are using an expensive, shitty product and there is an absolutely perfect, free alternative.
Even if the switching costs were certain to be amortized within a year you might not be able to switch e.g. because there is no money for a steep short-term investment.
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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.
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Half or more of our infrastructure is already Linux. They just don't know it. Our storage network, our phone system, our voicemail, virtualization hosting... all of the most important and core things are running on Linux.
Wake the hell up... (I say to the bosses out there)
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: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)
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)
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Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:4, Informative)
My response to Microsoft dick move. SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY. Medical institutions have no plan B.
Let enough doctors' iPads not be compatible with some crucial part of 'Plan A' and see if a Plan B doesn't start to materialize. Piss off enough 200,000 dollar a year MDs and the fifty to eighty a year IT peons figure out how to make shit change. Been there, seen it happen at a cozy little thousand employee company in Melbourne Florida just recently.
I'm guessing that 'doctor's iPads' are one of the reasons that MS is raising the price of CALs and various email/groupware/etc server licenses; but no mention of bumps to Win7/8 seats...
They don't have unlimited control over their clients(in particular, iDevices have left them flat footed at least until 'Surface' hits in volume, if not beyond); but they do have some leverage, and appear to be using it in a fairly logical way. This definitely isn't the time to be pushing the prices on endpoint OSes that are suffering; but(as long as access from other platforms isn't totally fucked, and at least for things like Exchange it isn't), there is a reasonably good chance that you can make up some of the difference just by bumping CALs and server license fees.
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: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.
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truly, with asp and access microsoft controls the world in its claws, now that we've been magically transported back to 1999.
Re:How to treat a loyal customer (Score:4, Informative)
It's a free market.
You might think only a moron would mod parent informative, but...
Around 2007, Microsoft realised tech sites like Slashdot had a significant involvement in the very public rejection of Vista as a replacement for XP. They hired several reputation management companies, including Waggener Edstrom and Burson Marsteller to manage their online presence before the W7 release.
One of the results of that was that the reputation mangers ran hundreds of sock-puppets in blogs and news aggregators, like Slashdot and Reddit. They swamped the discussions, including those unrelated to their OS with scripted comments based on a few themes - "Have you tried it yet?" "Much faster than XP" etc etc. There was no opportunity to discuss Linux/FOSS or any other non-proprietary effort without wading through dozens of highly moderated pro-Win 7 postings. Pretty much every first post was a Microsoft-favorable pamphlet.
The result was that almost anyone with a real interest in tech abandoned the site. There are still a few of the old die-hards here, but it's mostly marketers and sock-puppets now.
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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: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.
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.
great news for open source! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:great news for open source! (Score:5, Interesting)
Normally I'd reply with some dry cynicism, but actually I have noticed a bit of a sea change in my company recently (my company being a big UK national). We're just kicking off a project to implement a big MS software suite (SharePoint and peripheries, as an upgrade). The Architecture guys are dead set on the MS solution, which is no surprise (and the right choice, considering our ecosystem and our appetite for change at this exact moment). But what is a surprise is how much push back we've had from Procurement (who are not techies). They've been pushing us, HARD, to source alternatives and do a full tendering process.
I doubt it will come to anything, but it's the first time I've ever seen anyone with clout from outside of the IT department pushing against a Microsoft solution. If they have truly wised up and started to look at software sourcing with a bit more of a hard nose, future projects could be very interesting indeed.
Re:great news for open source! (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft is still a big employer, they keep programmers employed,
Never has the broken Windows fallacy been more apt or more fallacious...
Re:great news for open source! (Score:5, Funny)
See if those posts were about Windows Vista I could see the problem but Windows 7 is actually a really good OS. But have you tried Windows 8 yet? It's even faster than Windows 7 and has tons of features including our... I mean their new Metro interface. If you leave me your address I will send you a flyer or maybe a pamphlet about it.
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Can I have some of that to get me through the day?
Our customers use Linux and Solaris, and that's what I develop for. I have to do it from a crippled VM inside Windows 7 though, because our corporate policy is Windows Uber Alles. Every day I die a little on the inside.
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.
Re:Ballmer needs the net profit (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, given the way things are going, I'm quite content with him staying.
Re:Ballmer needs the net profit (Score:5, Interesting)
Euhm well yes and no. As much as I'd like to see Dr Evil go, I'd even rather see Dr Evil lose their evilness, be cut down to size, and play nicely along with the rest.
MS is a big company, it's never a good thing to see a big company fail, and not just because of the collateral damage it causes. MS going bankrupt (unlikely to happen any time soon considering how much assets they have, but just imagining) would, in short, be a disaster for this world. It would mean no more updates for Windows, and virus/malware writers would have the time of there life. There are no easy alternatives - Linux while a great alternative is by no means an easy switch, when you consider the taking along of all the user's existing data files and applications, many of which don't have a Linux version. OS-X is even worse as it requires complete change of hardware.
Secondly, MS as a big company is one of the few that can actually form viable competition against Google and Apple. Competition that's badly needed to keep those two in check.
And finally as a big company with all the money and brainpower that they have, they do have the potential to come with many innovations. The Surface is a good example of this, from the looks of it, it's a very nice device. Too bad their management can't make it really shine: too expensive, unappealing software.
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.
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MS going bankrupt (unlikely to happen any time soon considering how much assets they have, but just imagining) would, in short, be a disaster for this world. It would mean no more updates for Windows, and virus/malware writers would have the time of there life.
That's not how it works. When a large company goes bankrupt, it's assets are sold. In the case of MS, I suspect the Windows division would be split from Office, Xbox, etc. The buyer would naturally want to gain all those Windows customers, so they would be inclined to continue updates, etc. The situation could actually improve, with a new owner focused on a desktop OS, rather than the large number of products that currently compete for attention at MS.
Westinghouse was broken up, and the different divisi
last quarter was NOT ballmer's fault (Score:5, Interesting)
i'd be the last to defend ballmer, but that quarterly (4/12 to 6/12) "loss" was due to writing down the $6+ billion acquisition of aquantive.... which was stupidly bought (at a grossly overvalued price) while uncle bill was still in charge.
without the writedown on the books, they would have made MORE than during the same quarter the year prior.
Economic Geniuses (Score:5, Insightful)
I see: so if demand goes down, price goes up?
Good luck with that ...
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Indeed. Raising your core product prices by an extravagant amount, when you are flush with cash, because your most recent bet did not pay off, is dumb.
MS putting out a stinker, in the form of Windows 8, will prevent customers from upgrading to this OS.
MS raising their prices, because of this mistake, will cause their customers to look at other long term options.
And the sad part, as I highlighted above, is that they are doing it purely to meet Street 'expectations.' Probably one of the more important follies
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That's exactly how Bell thinks (Canada). Payphones are less and less used, and they're trying to *raise* the fees to 1$ (double of what it already is).
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.
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Yes, if you are are on the board of a company, you have to file with the SEC whether you are acquiring or selling stocks.
I don't think Ballmer wants to go to jail.
He has enough money on his own now that if he just simply leaves, he doesn't have to worry about having to short the stock.
Remove thine fucking tinfoil.
--
BMO
SharePoint is like a Swiss Army Gun (Score:5, Informative)
It does a number of things, some of them vaguely useful, but none as well as other stand-alone tools, it's awkward as hell, and people hate using it.
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."
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: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:SharePoint is like a Swiss Army Gun (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, it's only after the purchase has been made and the consultants are gone that people realize just how much SharePoint sucks.
The consultants leave at some point? When does that ever happen? That's another problem with Sharepoint: the cost to implement is high, but the cost to roll it out across the business and maintain it functionally as well as operationally, is unbelievable. This is a consultant's dream if you want your contract renewed for the forseeable future. (yes, I'm living the nightmare). Not to mention all the crap you have to deal with when you find, as a large organisation, that SP scales very poorly.
But at some point the extra cost will get noticed, and even the PHB might concede that we're indeed better off with Drupal, Confluence, Mediawiki and a good document management system.
Getting tough to support (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a Microsoft guy through and through, when it comes to the enterprise. These licensing costs are just getting really difficult to justify. I know there's some open source replacement available, but it's not all very coherently tied together the way MS stuff is. I'd love to be able to move away though.
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: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.
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Personally, I'd put Microsoft's initial monopoly down to:
* Making "good enough" software
* Getting their software pre-installed on computers
* Achieving ubiquity before the Internet/networking really took off (software is easier when you don't consider security)
* Bob
Re:Getting tough to support (Score:4, Interesting)
When you say 'best products' and microsoft together, I have to stop. Its just not true. In a few instances their products are easier to use (although it can be argued that easy comes from years of familiarity), but when you said best, I had to stop. About 10 years ago, I had to support a microsoft based system. It was very important on this system that the time be correct. Lawyers would regularly subpoena records, unions, bosses and employees were very interested in correct database timestamps. Yet microsofts NTP protocol was very broken and the time would drift quite badly from machine to machine. Microsoft had no resolution, and suggested 3rd party applications. Considering the company I worked for bought at least $3 million in microsoft products annually, you would think they would be helpful. And you would be wrong. I've heard people complain for years about open source software and that there is "no one to choke" when bad things happen. Well, I know that you are no better off with microsoft. I KNOW! When their license says 'no warranty either express or implied', that's what they mean, and that's the way things turn out. If I make it sound like life and death, that's good, because that's what it was: an emergency 911 centre. And their software was in use, and broken most of the time. Don't say microsoft and better to me. Don't do it. Its a bold faced lie.
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:Getting tough to support (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been working with my rep for major upgrades of Server and Exchange. I'm not seeing how any of this is cherry picked. CALs are being hiked in price. We've abandoned the idea of moving to server 2010 RDP CALs because the costs are just too difficult to justify. We will also be retaining our Server 2003 DCs at our branches until EOL. Not an ideal situation, but we can't currently justify the costs.
Re:Getting tough to support (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, some of the other changes are a result of edition consolidation. See original article:
http://www.softcat.com/news/industry-news/important-changes-to-microsoft-products-announced [softcat.com]
and this is why linux is now king (Score:4, Interesting)
in the 80s various flavors of UNIX locked their customers' data in expensive licensing deals.
then one day, windows NT came out and showed a cheaper way. around the same time Linux also came but only a few saw Windows as just another trap.
Now we have a prophecy realized.
disencumbered of the cash cow (Score:3)
It was a superb alternative to getting any work done. I'm sure that many of the people who chose to fight those battles saw some upside from their foolish devotion further down the road. But it was a long road. WinNT wasn't even much of a lock-in all by itself. But so many corporations just couldn't wait (this was the dotcom boom, remember?) to encapsulate mission critical business-logic in VB for IE4. Fifteen years later, th
Australian prices (Score:5, Informative)
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."
Allow me to translate, for Australian license partners,
Microsoft has increased user CALs pricing 45 per cent; SharePoint 2013 pricing by 114 per cent; Lync Server 2013 pricing by 1200 per cent; and Project 2013 Server CAL by 63 per cent."
Excellent (Score:5, Funny)
These idiots who didn't see it coming from miles away deserve to be squeezed by these assholes.
Microsofts income is down so to make up (Score:3)
Obviously not (Score:3)
How I read the summary... (Score:3)
"Tired of holding sway over a group of clients who have remained steadfast in their use of Microsoft products, the tech giant is doing all it can to give them reason to leave the fold by incentivizing alternatives and souring relations."
I mean, seriously, Microsoft? In the face of a less-than-expected level of consumer response to your recent flagship products, you decide to punish your remaining, loyal client base by raising their prices at a time when viable (and oftentimes cheaper) alternatives are becoming available and are being adopted in greater and greater numbers? This makes no sense.
When will Ballmer be kicked out already? Microsoft has smart people working there. If someone actually managed to clean house and eliminate all of the ridiculous middle management they have, I wouldn't be surprised if they could start putting out some decent stuff again. And, I'm saying that as someone who lumps himself in with Apple fanboys. I want to see Microsoft strong again and making products that people actually consider instead of scornfully rejecting, but I want to see them earn that spot through innovation and good design.
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.
Looking to implement SP (Score:3)
Re:Looking to implement SP (Score:5, Informative)
We've been using Alfresco's community edition. It has AD integration and does an okay job with Sharepoint protocols.
Re: (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 ma
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.
Exchange rate (Score:3)
Re:Exchange rate (Score:4, Informative)
That would not explain the difference in price rises (8-400%).
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
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I'd strongly argue that OWL was not crap. It was indirectly hindered by MS, which is what caused the frustration.
Remember that it was a brutally different time back then, when MFC was the most important thing to MS and the Windows codebase was tweaked to strongly favor MS products. Borland was at the complete mercy of Microsoft's shenanigans. As were many other companies in many other dev segments. But from a technical perspective OWL was certainly a much cleaner oo framework than MFC (imho).
Stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft are fucking idiots. Every enterprise customer they have already wants to get away from them, but the cost of migration is just too steep. What they did here was change that... even if the new rates still keep the cost bellow some threshold that would make it easier to migrate to something else, what they've really done is say to all their customers "We will price gouge you in the middle of a recession" and you can bet every IS/IT department in the country is going to be having meetings regarding just how quickly it'll really take to get out from under the chains of .NET
The android desktop OS is coming... we all know it. It'll be free and Google will have hordes of experts ready to fly out to your site and help you migrate... then what Microsoft?
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: (Score:3)
I could tell, when you asked for documentation rather than saying [citation needed] :)
hmm (Score:3)
Does not mean much (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha ha ha (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, others' claims above aren't far off about companies actually switching. We NEED certain MS-only enterprise apps but at $453 a piece for Office Pro Plus OLP, guess who's testing Libre Office Base with our Access databases this week.
Re:Okay, so which is it? (Score:5, Informative)
Not only OEM's but Enterprises as well and basically all Microsoft shops. You want Windows 7? You have to buy 8 with Software Assurance. You want Windows XP? You have to buy 8 with Software Assurance. You want Windows Server? You get 2 licenses of Windows 8 for their VirtualPC software. You want to build your own computer? Here's 8. You want to renew your contract for SA for 10,000 computers, they're now all eligible to run 8, also $1M please.
Re: (Score:3)
They moved back because the re-training costs were so high. These large price increases are likely to have them revisit those decisions.
It has been one of my more painful experiences that the market does not like to be cornered -> any time you think "And that's why they will have to go through me, and I will soak them for all they're worth!" you wake up with a live badger in your trousers. If MS is thinking "they have nowhere to run!" then the market is thinking "2 for 1 sale! Live badgers and wolverines
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.
Why does the farmer care about the cows feelings? (Score:5, Interesting)
Enterprise is MS cash cow and cows are milked and cows that protest to loudly are killed for fun, meat and an example to other cows.
The farmer does not care what the cow thinks of him, the opinion of cattle is worthless. Their enterprise customer have shown over decades to be completely incapable of independent thought so why should they change now? Oh, this price increase is the straw that broke the camels back? Breaking a back only works in animals that have a back bone. Cattle does not. The reason you can overwork donkeys and cows and dogs is because they are dumb animals that are easily domesticated. A smart animal would resist long before you overload it. Enterprise customers have not resisted. In fact, they resist every which way they can to any attempt to set themselves free or at least not be under complete and total control of their Microsoft master. Just go ahead, ask for a Linux desktop at a large Enterprise business like say Shell just to come up with a name. Can't be done. These slaves don't just accept the whip, they buy it for their master, oil it so it gives optimal whipping power and turn in anyone who tries to set them free or introduce laws trying to limit the amount of whipping that can be done.
And you think these Enterprise customers can be alienated? Same with the OEM's. They could have EASILY done a Linux machine by now. They didn't. And nothing MS will do will change that. They are OEM's, not Apple or a (the old) Nokia, they sell cheap clones with a generic OS and make their money from crapware. They don't have the willpower, brains, imagination to do anything else. Oh they might protest a bit, just like a cow might kick and kill a farmer but just as the cow will then just stand there and wait to be killed, the OEM's will throw a hissy fit and then assume the position again to be shafted by their beloved master.
Ballmer is a lot of things but one thing he really is, is a good sales manager. He knows just how much to squeeze the market for. And don't worry, any Enterprise that balks about a 400% price increase will get a special discount, just for them of say a 10% discount, now ain't you a special little cow! Any MS rep gives their big customers massive discounts. Just all big Enterprises give their loyal customers a big discount and NONE of them ever figure out that if THEY only give discounts that are less then the previous price increase, someone else might do the same to them.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Until it was obvious that the collaboration environment was simply not there and hurting our business in a really bad way.
Then they went out and researched the offerings available (yes, they did real research).
Guess what? In the collaboration environment, only Microsoft could deliver. The price tag was huge (by my standards anyway). The implementation
Re: (Score:3)