Simply nobody is rushing to beat the Microsoft licencing price hike The expected hordes of customers gathering to renew Microsoft volume licensing agreements before the planned price hike next month failed to show up, say a bunch of reseller sources. With the UK price list set to rise between 1.7 per cent to 25.9 per cent from 1 July, the software maker and partners reckoned on a mad rush from …
My preferred reseller says they've been very busy with MS business in the run up to the end of the month. We took out new agreements for Office which we needed to get done this year, might as well get the current price rather than pay more later in the year. Anyone waiting is an idiot, the prices will go up further when the Euro drops more.
I mean, are your existing copies then illegal (i.e. you just rented them so far), or do you just get no more support/upgrades?
I can imagine a number of companies are now considering a break in support and/or evaluating alternatives to either escape MS' clutches, or to make them offer a very good deal for a few more years in the handcuffs.
I believe most such agreements go into conventional perpetual licence agreements on termination of the enterprise agreement. That primarily ends your rights to up and down grade and get certain kinds of support. It will depend on your exact licence though.
Of course it would be mischievous to suggest that one may find a better deal if you can demonstrate a real linux/open office pilot .... allegedly it worked for a government department though ...
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/the-tony-collins-blog/2011/11/free-microsoft-if-you-threaten-to-buy-open-source/index.htm
It depends - if you bought perpetual license with software assurance, yes, they just become perpetual. If you are in a subscription agreement, however, and you let it lapse you're obliged to either buy out, uninstall the affected products or renew. The subscription agreements have a *significantly* lower upfront cost.
www.distrowatch.org
To all the people who moan about the Linux desktop, the above article is reason alone why enterprise needs the existence of a linux desktop//opensource alternatives - or in these tight times are companies happy pissing their money up the walls of Microsoft HQ?
I wonder how much of that extra cash will go on the legal assault of opensource / lobbying in support of ACTA?
With the state of the economy at the moment most businesses cannot afford to spend money on big licensing agreements even at the current prices. If you cannot afford to do big spends right now, you won't do big spends regardless of what cynnical price hike threats are thrown about.
M$ software has always been overpriced, they can put the prices up as much as they like but in the end if its too high people won't buy!
If people think that Microsoft prices are bad, then try some from SAP.
Our last bill was £90,000 just for the year. On top of that, the SI wanted to act as our first and second line support; that would then be another £75,000 per year - but no reduction in the fee to SAP though. It wouldn't be so bad, but their support people take days to respond; we end up fixing the problems in house ourselves before they even get around to reading the help desk tickets.
Try negotiating Oracle licensing, when with just a relatively small company like ours with about 100 DBs on around 70 servers, and various plugins and other Oracle toys and gizmos, we still pay over a £1.5m a year in licensing costs. I'd hate to think how much our total outlay for software licensing is when we factor in our 2000 odd Windows desktops and 750 odd Windows servers, Blackberry support, RSA support, EMC SANs, CISCO network kit, firewalls, net-monitors and proxies!
You ever paid for bespoke financial software? That's the racket to be in! Year on licensing costs for a single application for 25 users can cost in excess of £250k to some tinpot company with 3 developers working from an office London's West End, glad it's not my money! The old adage of one born every minute applies so aptly to some of our project managers!
I'd love to know what your company does - 2000 odd Windows desktops with 750 odd Windows servers - That's less than 3 workstations for each server.
Back in the day, when I used to do this stuff, our rough rule of thumb was 1 Windows server for 10-30 Windows clients; or 1 *NIX box for 50-200 users; or 2 mainframes to hold it all together for about 50,000 users.
Uphill, in the snow both ways...
As with most IT departments, it's entirely possible that you don't have the manpower, but if you could put together the OSS that is the equivalent of what you use now, or a close proximity, you might be able to get a better deal from your vendors. At that point you might find that you could incorporate a lot of it into your network.
Since the world is becoming increasingly less Microsoft-centric, you'd think this would devalue them and us consumers would see prices drop. But history shows that bizarrely in these situations, prices go up.
I'm guessing that as iProducts, Androids and other non-MS things continue to uncouple people from their traditional PC-centric lives, us dumb schmucks who build our own PCs and buy OEM copies (and the 'special' people who go to PC World and buy a proper retail copy) will end up paying through the nose for the privilege.
It's hard for people who buy pre-made retail PCs to gauge the price of Windows, as the cost of hardware is such a moving target. Most people don't really know how to evaluate the processor, graphics card and other technicalities of their off-the-shelf PCs, especially when they're fancy all-in-one touchscreen machines, so they have no idea what they're paying for or whether the computer has a high profit margin.
Right now, my only problem with Windows XP is that it only addresses 4GB of memory. Maybe I'll upgrade to a 64-bit version, though I have some notion that 64-bit WinXP has quite a few glitches compared to Windows 7?
As for Windows 8, it's probably a very good thing for consumers, but not technosavvy people like me, who like to mess around with the system and its defaults.
If you are going 64-bit, then *don't* bother with XP - driver support is shocking, since there was no absolute requirement to provide 64-bit XP drivers to gain XP logo certification, so a huge number of manufacturers just wagged it. Windows 7 64-bit is lovely. Performs as well or better on the same hardware, is more stable and so forth. I'm not rushing for 8 either.
Yes, technosavvy. The OS works, is stable, secure (thanks to app the patches and proper AV software). And ultimately not much matters about the OS, it's the apps.
It says a lot when someone's more obsessed with the OS than the apps. You mention 32-bit after I specifically stated that 64-bit is my only constraint right now.
My environment works flawlessly, squanders few CPU cycles, sees the RAM go far and makes me money. You're so technosavvy, you can't even operate the reply button on a messageboard, so probably best to avoid your armchair expert computer advice, eh.
My recommendation is not to rush into any new agreements with a gun pointed to your head, in my experience all is negotiable and pricing can be mitigated by discounting, I recommend planning any EA renewal many months in advance and evaluate all options and leverage points, there is always something to be used when negotiating with Microsoft.
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