Microsoft Will Squeeze Datacenters On Price of Windows Server 274
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft plans to raise the price of the Datacenter edition of the upcoming R2 release of Windows Server 2012 by 28 percent, adding to what analysts call a record number of price increases for enterprise software products from Redmond. According to licensing data sheets available for download from the Windows Server 2012 R2 Website (PDF), the price of a single license of Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter will be $6,155, compared to $4,809 today—plus the cost of a Client Access Licenses for every user or device connecting to the server. News of the increase was posted yesterday by datacenter virtualization and security specialist Aidan Finn, a six-time Microsoft MVP who works for Dublin-based value added reseller MicroWarehouse Ltd. and has done work for clients including Amdahl, Fujitsu and Barclays. The increase caps off a year filled with a record number of price increases for Microsoft enterprise software, according to a Tweet yesterday from Microsoft software licensing analyst Paul DeGroot of Pica Communications."
Fine with me (Score:5, Insightful)
RedHat should see a nice increase in business because of this.
Re:I'm not that surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good riddance. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, and I wonder what the prices would be if there were no Linux or BSDs, and people had to choose between MS, solaris, some other flavours of unix, OSX.
Free software helps even those not adopting it.
Re:I'm not that surprised. (Score:2, Insightful)
The gain is, "You can only buy R2 Licenses once it's released".
Re:Fine with me (Score:3, Insightful)
It's fine with me because all those smug assholes who were too shortsighted to see this coming from twenty years ago should suffer for their stupidity. And in this day and age, whoever is stupid enough not to be moving forward with a Microsoft exit strategy deserves what is coming to them.
I'm afraid you've got it backwards. (Score:3, Insightful)
We just left Red Hat - converted the entire datacenter from an OpenLDAP/samba infrastructure on Red Hat 5 & 5 to an AD/windows environment - because Red Hat couldn't (or more acurately wouldn't) meet Microsoft's pricing. The fact that HyperV proved to be fantastically more stable and capable than RHEVM (and RHEVM had Active Directory dependencies) didn't help the situation any, but it was price discrepancy that really did it.
We had to replace hardware anyway, so we priced out new software while we were at it. Microsoft won on value for the dollar, crushing Red Hat (and also VMware). I personally prefer Open Source so I'm kind of bitter about it, but I had to do what was best for the company in order to keep our staff gainfully employed. That's what companies are for, to support people.
Re: Fine with me (Score:2, Insightful)
Not much in real dollars since you get unlimited virtualization rights with datacenter and with current hardware you can decrease your server count
Re:Microsoft layoffs down the road? (Score:3, Insightful)
These dramatic price hikes look like Microsoft is working to stem the tide of massive losses with increased revenue in their core product domains.
Microsft is still an extremely profitable company - Profit margins of over 28% [yahoo.com].
But their stock price hasn't done much in over a year - It's about where it's at in March of '12.
Wall Street doesn't like that. They want growth.
MS, I think, is hoping that this will give a revenue and profit boost to help the stock price.
In meantime, I just see MS throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks.
I don't necessarily see cuts - although that is a quick way to boost profits short terms - I do see possible acquisitions.
Re:Fine with me (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the guys at the FSF along with the major Linux players like Red hat and Canonical really should get together and bake a really nice cake for Steve Ballmer, because he is singlehandedly doing what Linux never could, completely destroying MSFT and killing Windows. From the "LULZ HAI I'm a cellphone, seen my appstore?" Windows 8 debacle to jacking the price of both home and server versions of Windows in a dead economy to burning Xbox with his retarded "hey lets bleed the gamers for more cash!" scheme, his pathetic leadership and Dilbert PHB obsession with Apple and the stock price is completely trashing the company.
So you mean this is why Microsoft's net income has basically TRIPLED over the last 10 years?
Re:Fine with me (Score:3, Insightful)
Centos then...
Re:Fine with me (Score:2, Insightful)
You mean in this day and age, there are morons who still have executive level jobs that actually like Windows *Server*? I suppose if they really, really hate Oracle they may need it for SQL Server, but that's all I can think of. If you want to argue cost, you can argue for like Red Hat or even CentOS (if they can get over the fact that they aren't paying anyone for support).
And yeah, there will still be AD servers, Desktop support file/print share servers and Sharepoint servers, but you use Linux for every other type of server if you have a brain at all. Not only are Linux variants cheaper, they're also better at being servers.
Of course, as you suggested, Windows on the desktop is a completely different story.
Thank you Microsoft (Score:1, Insightful)
Thank you for not fitting in my IT budget in any possible way whatsoever. Saves me a lot of time doing cost analysis of all possible options: MS options don't fit in budget even without support hours, so it will have to be an open-source solution, no matter how many hours I may spend on it. I like a back and white world, where I can just ignore grey.
Re:Fine with me (Score:4, Insightful)
That's right... you'll never catch me driving a crappy Toyota car. I'll drive a Lexus any and every day.
Idiots.
Now Microsoft on the desktop is another matter... a lot harder to get away from.
I'm missing the analogy. Lexus is a re-badged and gussied up Toyota. And both are reliable cars.
Re:Microsoft layoffs down the road? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wall street doesn't love Microsoft because its business model for the last dozen years ago is about squeezing increasing license fees out of locked in customers. Nobody is under any illusion about where that leads.
Knowing that, Microsoft has been desperately thrashing about trying to find some new market into which it can extend its monopoly. Arguably, the biggest single factor in forestalling Microsoft's boundless ambition was Mozilla, which ended Microsoft's dreams of becoming gatekeeper to the internet. Then Apple killed Microsoft's hopes in the phone market and Sony refused to concede the high end console market. Next sea change is, the corporate workplace moves to the cloud and Microsoft isn't invited to the party.
Last year's flurry of new product hype was just comical. Microsoft got the benefit of the doubt that time. They shot their wad, next manic outbreak of product announcements will get exactly zero cred.
Re:Who knew... (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a significant install base of Windows in datacenters? Who knew...
Every fortune 500 company?
Once you get away from internet and other tech companies, Windows has a *huge* back office presence.
Once you make the investment into Windows to run your back office, there's not much incremental cost to add servers here and there to do other things, it's not worth the investment to switch to Linux for a few servers, and then as "a few servers here and there" grow to hundreds of servers running mission critical tasks, it's even harder to move away from Windows. Microsoft is good at lock-in -- their products work well (mostly) with each other, but poorly with everyone else. So once you move down the Windows path you get more and more ingrained in it. And, just like there are plenty of Linux zealots, there are plenty of Windows zealots that are firmly convinced that Microsoft is the One True Way to get things done in the corporate world - and of course, much of the software that you companies use to use to run their business only runs on Windows.
Re:Fine with me (Score:4, Insightful)
So you mean this is why Microsoft's net income has basically TRIPLED over the last 10 years?
Profit isn't really the best measurement of the success of a company in an expanding industry. Even if your profit increased, if over the same period you've lost market share, you've essentially failed. Not that I have any clue what MS market share looks like over the last 10 years; you still might be correct.
Son, please tell me you do not work for a for profit company?
Re:Fine with me (Score:3, Insightful)
Netcraft.com shows the opposite for the past 5 years actually.
IIS is gaining popularity as Windows is replacing Unix. Linux is stagnant the last time I looked. With MS CRM the lockin is actually increasing and many 3rd party products link to SQL Server rather than Oralce now requiring more Windows Servers.
Help desk ticking systems to backups for MS Access databases are driving this.
Re:Fine with me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doubtfull (Score:3, Insightful)
Who says it is MS CRM or whatever?
Fact of the matter I.T.is there to help them do business. Nothing more and nothing less. They do not care about freedom or what someone says on slashdot. They use software that is made for Windows only to do this. Just because it runs on Windows does not mean it is crap.
It has been said a million times people do not want to be free of Microsoft. Slashdotters who have not run Windows in a decade are unaware it is not based on DOS anymore. It doesn't crash. It is not buggy anymore. It works. Maybe there is no other peice of software that works for thier niche set of processes that is available on Unix? Maybe the CEO had a round of golf with the sales person and no platform was discussed when they shook hands on it with a beer later?
In many ways Linux is not favorable to the average person who sees no need to free themselves?
Linux does not even have a stable ABI which means an update can break ATI drivers. It is not a good desktop OS for this reason as Hairyfeet has mentioned he tried selling Linux boxen. Customers always return them when an update breaks something or a printer doesn't work. Since Windows has an ABI it means a driver or piece of software will work between versions! Unix has it but Linux does not as it would encourage people to write binary blobs ... oh the horrors.
I favor FreeBSD for this reason but you need an expensive Redhat certified system because of the driver issue and them working with the server vendor so you save little if anything anyway. Add VSphere to the mix and it is more expensive than Windows Data center on the same hardware if you want to run virtual machines.
Office and Photoshop work. SAP works. That VBA macro for Excel and Access that Bob wrote in Finance that is now a central business process that makes money works! You cost money as a cost center.
Now who do you think the big boss will listen too? Bob that wrote that VBA macro/SAP salesperson that generated 3 million dollars, or some nerd who recites things from RMS who costs $60,000 a year? Your ass will be shown the door. Simple.
I used to be like you but man the real world is different than my Moms place and college where I played with Linux and FreeBSD. Money is money and whatever helps generate it with the least hassle wins and of course politics if you want job security.
Re:I'm afraid you've got it backwards. (Score:2, Insightful)
Having said all that it's difficult to come up with many scenarios where the above actually fits and makes sense. Bringing Windows into a Linux environment has a cost of having to bring in Windows guys, and that cost could easily tip the balance back in the favour of Linux anyway.
1: Assuming you never use any of the features in VMWare. HyperV isn't feature-rich.
Re:Microsoft is really trying to boost Linux downl (Score:4, Insightful)
Are they insane? Six grand for a server OS that literally can be replicated with any Linux distribution and a few things like SAMBA, Rsnapshot, etc? So long as it LOOKS like a Windows server to the user community, they don't care.
I take it you have not seen an Oracle License for Solaris have you?
They go for up to $100,000 as the database is part of the deal whether you need it or not!
$6,000 is laughable cheap as the real cost comes when Samba doesn't work for a 3,000 user environment where shit wont break because of a Windows Update to the clients or if you need virtualization.
VSPhere last time I looked was $8000+. So $6,000 is -$2000 less than debian plus VSPhere to run your virtual machines believe it or not. Dynamic I/o that moves the requests to the least uitilized SAN/volume means hardware savings too and Linux (outside of IBM's flavor) still does not have this.
The enteprise is totally different than the desktop world.
in a growing market, you want to lose money. (Score:5, Insightful)
You try to LOSE money in an expanding market. More on that later. The problem is, Microsoft isn't in an expanding market. Google an Apple are. Microsoft isn't really in that market, the mobile market.
In an expanding market, especially a market where critical mass is so important (think app stores), it's all about market share during the time when the market is doubling every year or so. Remember the search engine wars? There were seven major search engines. The largest was HotBot (Inktomi). Guess how much Hotbot, AltaVista, and Excite have made in the last five years? Google is making billions per quarter because they got controlling market share while the total market was tens of milllions. To get that critical market share during the growth phase, the right move is to spend as much as you can on to gain more market share. If you turned a profit, those profit dollars are dollars you should have spent on marketing, expanding production, or otherwise growing your market share.
But again, though his statement is true, it doesn't apply to Microsoft, unless they actually want to get into mobile. If they want to be a significant player in mobile, they should have spent another $400 million developing something that could compete. That would be a $400M "loss", in exchange for a shot to remain relevant in the consumer market.
Re:Doubtfull (Score:4, Insightful)
Does anyone, anywhere actually like their ERP system? *boggle* The point is, server licensing is a small piece of the pie, and stuff like ERP retraining cost would be a rather larger piece.
Just in general, if your IT works well enough that it's not a major source of pain for whatever your business actually does, it's very hard to justify any sort of major change. That's why 1970s mainframe software was still quite popular until the Y2K costs hit - it may not be perfect, but it's OK and we're used to it.