Posts by Al S Cook
4 posts • joined Wednesday 30th September 2009 03:25 GMT
How about a 4x price rise?
Some customers will see the price go up much more than 20%.
Many enterprise customers' standard box is a 4x10 server--four procs, 10 cores each.
With SQL Server 2008, they could license the entire box using SQL Server Enterprise, with four proc licenses costing about $25,000 each, or $100,000 for the whole box. To do the same thing with SQL 2012, they need to license 40 cores, at about $7K each, which will cost them $280,000. Then, they need to have Software Assurance as well (which wasn't required with SQL 2008 if you wanted unlimited SQL VMs). That adds 75% to the price of the product over three years, and continues after that at 25% a year. So that's another $210,000 for the first three years. Total: $470K--nearly a half-million to license one of these boxes if you need to buy SQL licenses for it and want the right to run unlimited SQL instances. A bit more than a 20% increase, I'd say. (They can probably get a 20% discount for volume, but that still only brings the price down to about $400K)
Not hearing much compassion for the poor here
Finally someone (multipharious) speaks up with some common sense.
I assume that everyone who objects to this technology routinely goes out of their way to help reduce poverty and leaves a coin in the hand of every beggar who accosts them.
If that's not the case, then recognize that that, thanks to urbanization and technology itself (e.g., home-based workers like me), the poor are pushed even further out of the public space and most important, the public eye. I regularly use my computer to contribute to causes I believe in. I also drop coins into outstretched hands. I don't really care how it gets there.
I agree that the latter approach ensures that the money gets into the hands of the people who need it, much of the time, but frankly, for time reasons I'm not going to go way out of my way to find beggars that I can personally help if there are organizations that help them that I can contribute to.
Use Opera
Didn't notice the change on my Curve, since I don't use the awful RIM browser. I use Opera, which is faster, better and uses Google as the default.
Taking care of shareholders
OK, Steve, let's talk about who is doing the most for shareholders. In the last five years, IBM share are up 40% and MS shares are down 10%--after spending about $80B of shareholder money on stock buybacks. IBM borrowed $11B to buy back shares.Total dividends about the same over the period. Which company would you bet on?
