Shelfware wars should be conceded, admits Microsoft compliance boss

The future . . .

. . . is pay for use, not per licence or per install. That's real use - a better analogy would be renting an aircraft - I pay for flight hours not hanger hours, that way we can control the costs and be more flexible with workloads. Small businesses need to know the costs, that's why they often still use forms of HP (hire purchase). I know some suppliers do this already but not enough and I know this is not so good for the supplier, but they can aggregate etc. Innovate or die.

As an aside, we dumped Microsoft for all business/office software some years ago partly due to fears of an audit - the terms were so arcane and obscure we felt it was impossible to prove compliance unless starting again - so we did!

Am I missing something? In 2012, EU mandates that shelfware can be transferred. 2016, Brexit vote. What is everybody thinking about? To what extent UK should emulate EU laws. UK rep of huge software concern says they should be / will be reasonable. The reasonable reason for this is that they don't want shelfware to be transferrable in the new post-EU UK. This is to maximize their black ink. Rare is the corp that does anything for any other reason.

in the past...

I worked in IT support for a major global corporation. We had a licensing deal with Microsoft where we simply reported the number of copies in use and paid the agreed fee. The terms of the deal allowed MS to commission an audit.

I was unhappy with the deal as it was so difficult for us to keep a handle on numbers and end-users were always pressuring support staff to install without placing a purchase order (it would come off individual departments' budgets). I set up a scheme whereby we issued internal pro-forma licenses on a per-PC basis and the support staff would only install on sight of the license.

MS invoked their right to undertake an audit (this was over a decade ago). We were told that no company had ever come up clean so we may as well just accept that we'd be in breach and pay up (I think their estimate was USD10M). We declined and the auditors arrived. The task was subcontracted to a major accountancy firm. After a few weeks they said our record keeping was immaculate, best they ever seen. But that wasn't the right answer for MS or for the accountants as they were on a deal where if they'd not found a discrepancy they'd not be paid. So they reappeared to take a second look and "try harder".

The eventual outcome was complicated, take a deep breath or skip the detail... We'd bought PCs where the bundled version of Windows was a newer version than we were using and we needed retain standardisation across our fleet. A bit of a parallel with the current Win10 fiasco where MS are rather too keen to push everyone to the new OS, they were insisting that manufacturers ship only with the new OS and the old wasn't even on sale. The PC manufacturer could not ship with the old license nor with no license as their deal with MS was that they had to pay a license fee for every device they manufactured. The license for the new version was clear that it was ONLY for that version.

My view was that we should just load the older version and disregard the license terms on the basis that MS would look ridiculous if they tried to enforce compliance and in any case the license terms were probably drafted with the intention of making it clear that it didn't cover any future version of Windows without really considering our scenario. I was overruled and in order not to breach license terms we had to come to a special arrangement with MS.

We were required to pay an "upgrade fee" to license those PCs for the older version! which we did. I don't recall which version of windows this relates to but the actual "upgrade" licenses were for the new version which we already had, shipped on the PCs but the agreement was that those licenses would legitimise use of the older version (and MS didn't actually have a "downgrade" license and couldn't/wouldn't provide licenses for our preferred older version). I know this sounds ridiculous but it evidences how keen we were to stick within the MS licensing terms - and how keen MS were to use our preference for the old version as a pretext to screw more money out of us.

A couple of years later we undertook an exercise to convert the whole fleet to the new version. The "defect" in our record keeping was that the PCs that had been "upgraded" and for which we had the upgrade licenses were now on the version of windows that they were shipped with. We didn't have those original licenses and the PC manufacturer had folded so they weren't there to offer any help. This was maybe 5 years after the original purchase so we didn't even have all those PCs but we did have all the "upgrade" licenses on file. The arguement was, how come you have upgrade licenses without evidence that you bought the original to upgrade from?

A face saving deal was engineered so the auditors didn't have to go away empty handed, we stumped up, if I recall correctly, USD100K to get them off our premises and stop wasting any more of our staff time.