Microsoft hikes volume prices by more than a third Microsoft will ramp up the cost of volume licensing by as much as a third from the start of July when it aligns list prices across Europe to the Euro currency. The move, which affects the prices of products bought in bulk by organisations, was initiated following complaints from Microsoft bosses on the continent that were …
The saddest thing about all this is that a lot of people will just swallow these price rises and then pass them on to the public.
If any of them had an ounce of sense they would be reaching out for alternatives, Linux , naturally springs to mind. Red Hat could not be described as a "fly by night" company having posted over a $ billion dollars in revenue last year. But they won't, they will just carry on as before.
Absolutely crazy!
Interesting that M$ think that the sir Humphries will pay an extra 33.4%
A damming indictment of both parties,
1) M$ because they think that they think they will get away with a huge price increase for selling licensing software to the government
2) the Humphries for creating an environment when companies think they will get away with overcharging the government
"And what have you to say regarding the price hikes that RedHat currently have in the works?"
Use Scientific Linux or Centos, or if Red Hat is not for you use Suse, or Unbuntu or Debian or..., well the list is a bit long for a post.
The point that I'm making is that there ARE alternatives to Microsoft. It just takes a little initiative to find them and devise a plan to move.
I don't have much to say about any price hikes from Red Hat, other than that Red Hat do give value-for-money.
First, we're really only paying for support services; there's no real licencing fee for RHEL. If you don't want support, just load-up CENTOS or Scientific Linux, as suggested by other commenters.
Second, we only pay the Red Hat support fees on our production servers; the client computers can run other versions of Linux better suited for desktop applications than RHEL. The development/prototype servers run CENTOS. There are, of course, no "per-client" licencing fees we see from the likes of Microsoft.....
Linux isnt a solution for everyone. We have a department of 2 to support 200 pcs and about 400 users. We need a solution that works. We use exchange, sql, iis, TMG and a lot of group policies. To switch to linux would be (quite simply) impossible so I have no choice but to swallow the price increases. Dont get me wrong, I do have linux servers on the network. Our internet filtering system is a debian squid and dansguardian box (this was a proverbial nightmare to set up). I also have a couple of openfiler iSCSI boxes (there were very easy to set up).
Linux simply does not have the same domain functionality that M$ servers offer to me.
Fine so long as UK prices are aligned with USA, anybody got figures on this?
If we are being asked to pay over the odds and cover costs of minority language software versions and support most of us don't need in the UK this would be very unfair and a compelling reason to look at non-Microsoft alternatives.
For the first time our organisation (a fairly old school financial services firm of about 500 people) have given serious thought to moving people away from MS on their desktop. We've toyed with the idea of Linux (and a Java Desktop) in the past, but it hasn't been more than a pipedream. Recently with the price of MS software increasing, the hassle of getting virtual "anything" working with MS licensing, plus our users becoming more familiar with alternatives, leaving MS becomes a real option for a subset of our users.
The problem is still application compatibility, plus the mighty MS office, so we're not going to get there quickly - but every year becomes easier.
@"plus the mighty MS office"
I encountered this same obstacle, but over time, I was able to encourage the whole company to move over to Open Office. :)
Also I got them all onto Firefox. :)
I was moving them slowly towards Linux, one program at a time. :)
The sales pitch for Open Office is, its free, it can do everything most users want out of MS Office, they can even have a free copy of Open Office at home and it can even produce PDF's for manuals etc.. Tell that to your bosses. Times are hard, bosses want to save money. :)
Interesting this price rise is coming in and Microsoft decided a month or two ago to ask for audit submissions from everyone on their books (according to our reseller everyone was hit with it all at once), including our company.
I bet once the price rise has gone in they will claim a bunch of legitimately paid for licenses are invalid so we are forced to buy them all again at the inflated price.
This at the same time as they're going to have a very hard time convincing businesses to move on to Windows 8. MS must think that Linux won't provide any credible threat to their monopoly for the forseeable future.
I do hope that the British Governement reconsiders any special relationship they have with MS. They (and us) are being taken for a ride.
"Re: When meeting MS people...
That won't work - it will just convince them that you really must have masses of money to piss away."
@Colin Millar
Just turn up with the old Lenovo(*) running Ubuntu 'for evaluation purposes'
That should do it...
(*) Old enough so that Windows 8 might be a struggle, but plenty of ram and Unity 2d so Ubuntu runs quick....
' He added that from July the single list price irrespective of currency will "help to create a vibrant ecosystem for our partners". '
Hold on....
He added that from July the single list price irrespective of currency will "help to create a huge amount of cash for us as we've pissed most of it on bad ideas and failures, like Windows mobile. Face it Nokia volume purchases on mobile O/S ain't going to keep this ship afloat! Stuff it, we'll screw over our most loyal customers!'
SPLA users are only supposed to get price increases in January, there's a get out so existing clients only get charged the old rates until next Jan or when they leave your service.
The catch, give MS all your customer details!
Well that should help them cherry pick your big customers for azure even though Cedexis (see yesterdays story) seems to show them as a bad cloud performer for response times and error rates. http://www.cedexis.com/country-reports/#countries/GB/reports
Wow. I understood that MS was less than an automatic choice in Europe these days but it seems that MS is on surer footing than I was led to believe.
Haven't seen such gouging since the UK went metric, at which time I hadn't seen such gouging since the UK had gone decimal.
Wait, do I see a pattern?
M$ work the same way. They just send repeat invoices for stuff people generally don't need and often wouldn't want if they bothered to look, and make the prices up as they go along. Thanks to corporate inertia, the monkeys in accounting just rubber-stamp the invoices and off you go.
This increase is going to be a huge problem for most people. It's really not as simple as just saying "switch to Linux". If it really was as simple as just switching, people would do it more often...
It can be done and in some places and cases it can be done relatively quickly and easily - but in other businesses it would be a lot more difficult and potentially more costly than the increases etc.
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