Eurozone death spiral forces Microsoft to ease UK licensing price hike Microsoft has confirmed that the pending price hike on volume licensing will not be as steep as the initial preview indicated due to the weakening of the Euro currency in recent weeks. At the start of last month, Redmond said it expected UK biz customers would pay between 7.5 per cent and 33.5 per cent more for software …
...they'll extend XP life YET AGAIN???
Effing fantastic, Microsoft! Most companies have already completed their IT budgets, now get hit by this whammy.
PHB to the Board of Directors, cap-in-hand
"Please, Sir, can we have some more?"
"Why?"
"Because that nasty Microsoft wolf wants another 25%"
"Nope. Just buy 25% less licences....for 25% fewer staff!"
The price of the software is set at a level that the market will stand, not what it actually costs them with a bit of reasonable profit. Like there's an actual, real life 100 quid difference between home office 2010 and the business edition.
The prices are set at a level where they can gouge out of us as much as is possible. The retail price and the 'manufacturing' price bear absolutely no relationship to each other.
From the El Reg article http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2012/06/01/apotheker_steria/
"At SAP he caused a storm during his 10-month tenure as CEO by leading the firm to its first quarterly loss in seven years, and faced a customer backlash after attempting to raise prices during a recession."
Hmmm....raising prices during a recession....not such a good idea then, maybe.
The Company I work for is still going to be screwed by Micro$oft come the price hike.
Previously we've always qualified for Academic pricing because we're a registered charity and are classed as a "Social Enterprise" according to Microsoft.
MS are now changing the criteria for this and because we don't receive >10% in donations and we don't receive >50% from public sector contracts we're being moved to a Commercial License model, despite the fact that we're a non-profit organisation AND a registered charity.
This amounts to around a 500% increase in our licensing costs still!
Oh well, this will only serve to accelerate the uptake of Linux within our Company, so there is a good side to this already...
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