Microsoft flogs subscriptions to the unwary and confused There's no such thing as a coincidence or a missed opportunity in the world of Microsoft, and this is no ordinary week. Just days before thousands of partners from across the globe descend on Microsoft's annual World Wide Partner Conference in the heat of Texas, Microsoft announced licensing programs clearly intended to whet …
"Windows Live OneCare was launched by Microsoft with the promise that it would improve computer security because it automatically took care of the updates for them."
They've replaced the free Windows Update with the $50 Windows Live OneCare? Such a deal! Microsoft is looking more and more like a bank every day, what with all of the fees and service charges involved with simply using their relatively expensive products. Maybe they're trying to move toward the OSS model, but they just haven't brought down their product acquisition prices, yet?
What with WINE hitting version 1.0 and Reactos getting closer to beta, there's a growing field where Windows software can be used without Windows! Why do you suppose Vista was such a big break from NT and XP driver compatibility without actually offering any real user benefits? Could it be to maintain incompatibility?
So Microsoft switches to a subscription model to keep the cash coming in from Word and Outlook before everybody jumps ship, big surprise there.
Why would you, as a business, entrust your potentially business-critical IP:
* To a Service Provider you can't monitor or have independent verification of your data security? Can you hire a 3rd Party to investigate their internal procedures & verify that they're doing what they claim, that your data is as disaster-resistant as they claim, that you can actually get to your data as desired? Would you willingly equip your car with locks from a "Security Specialist" who refused to let you verify their locks worked?
* To a SP that, if you feel your business is better taken elsewhere, can hold your data hostage? Unless you keep a local copy of your data that you can access withOUT their Service (in which case you don't NEED their Service), they hold all the cards & you're now at the mercy of an Entity that has only ONE concern - their bottom line. Your data means *nothing* to them, and if you try to switch, they can dump it into the trash faster than you can request it back. Would you be willing to rent a car that, if you decided you didn't like & wished to rent a different one, were told that everything you had IN the car was now being held hostage until you paid the owner what-ever amount they felt like charging you for the items' return?
* To a SP that has been, can be, and will probably ALWAYS be, the most INsecure system on the internet? They are constantly having to patch all the bugs, security holes, and out-right coding-idiocy that consistently puts their own systems at risk, in the hopes that it will minimize the amount of "collateral damage" their customers suffer. Would you honestly be willing to entrust your family to be passengers in a vehicle from a manufacturer that was consistently having to recall their products to fix "safety issues"?
Think about it.
You're placing potentially business-critical information in the hands of a third party whom you can't audit, can't bargain with if you decide to change Service Providers, and can't EVER be sure that your data won't be stolen/sold to the first person/business who wants to take a shot at stealing/buying it.
It costs FAR less to host your own on-&-off-site data retention Servers, Disaster Recovery policies, & a Volume License Copy of MS Office.
The ROI for Covering Your Own Arse is much, MUCH less than the TCO for entrusting your business' future to the inept hands of Microsoft.
OneCare runs on XP as well as Vista. Try reading the sys reqs.
Why the hell does it matter that CircuitCity is the first to sell Equipt? It's going to be flogged via Partners, retailers and MS directly - so what's the point of highlighting that CC is doing badly generaly?
Equipt is aimed for the SME market. As such the cost model is very attractive. A startup doesn't need to have any capital for the software that they know works.
Personally it's no for me, but I can see why some would see it as being attractive.
Yeah, sure I'll do that.
As soon as I get a major sledgehammer to the head that makes me forget the (outrageous) price I already paid for Office 2000.
I will never willfully give money to any corporation that embeds shoddy DRM into the products it intends to foist upon me, for one. That cuts out Vista and any related software pretty quick.
Next, I see no reason to pay for office software that Office 2000 does fine. If I really hit a compatibility wall, I'll just use OpenOffice or, at worst, request an open-format version of the file from the sender.
Frankly, relying on the regular authorization of MS or any other provider in order to simply do day-to-day work is nonsense of the highest order.
Somehow, though, the dark part of me almost wishes for this to come into being. The day the authentication server is down and a whole continent of clueless companies cannot work, the lawsuits will be fun to watch.
looks like the M$ Shitanic is sinking a little further every day. Perhaps they should start seriously thinking about 'doing an Apple' and just release a Unix based system that ACTUALLY WORKS. (For the record I'm a GNU/Linux user). I'm surprised that MS hasn't already just taken one of the *BSD codebases, ripped it off and turned it into Windows 7. Their biggest problem is the 20 years or so of legacy shit that they keep trying to retain some kind of backwards compatibility with.
PROTIP: Give Up.
They could easily make WINE perfectly compatible with XP and Vista and use it as it to support legacy apps until developers started writing software for the new OS. if only they were willing to open up the code......
Paris because she can inspect my stack any day.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
