Sysadmins: Let's perch on Microsoft Santa's lap, show him our wish list Griping is easy. Solving problems in an acceptable way is not. I've had a year to chew on what exactly it is about Microsoft's recent moves that bugs me, so it's time to put my money where my mouth is and try to be constructive. Here is my wish list for the next iteration of Windows, offered in the vain hope that someone at …
nah-nah-nah-nah-nah can't hear you.
Being serious for a moment.
MS are clearly trying to keep their revenue/gross margins up. With the lack of people buying into the Windows 8 nightmare they are seeing their daily takings dropping. So they are raising the prices of just about everything else in their price book.
Whilst this may have a short term $$$ value I am sure that many such as the Author will be looking for lower cost alternatives
IMHO, MS are in a downward spiral and these moves seem to be nearly the last throws of their dice in the Enterprise Game.
My Employers are firmly wedded to the MS Mantra with whole swathes of software written in .Net. Thankfully some of us have been preaching platform independence for some time. The ironic thing is that it is IBM who are key suppliers to us in many areas because of the ability to run things like MQSeries on a wide range of Hardware.
If they want a quick way to bring in some cash they could just offer Windows XP -> Windows 7 upgrades for, say, $50/£30, instead of the ludicrous prices they charge for W7 at the moment.
It might not get people onto Windows 8, but at least it would help get them off XP...
Even if the VDI licensing was the only thing that MS take seriously from above, that will be a step in the right direction.
Also the gap between educational and corporate pricing is rediculous.
I recently priced up the upgrade from my 2005 SQL server to 2012. Oh. My God.
Absolute minefield.
And after speaking to no less than 3 microsoft licensing 'experts' did they finally agree on a price that I should pay. I then asked a friend of mine who works in educatin to get a quote based on the same config. Thousands of $ difference for exactly the same product.
Absolute joke.
I'm currently spending that money on getting my DBs and applications that use them moved over to openSQL for a dev cost that's less than half the price of the upgrade
And after speaking to no less than 3 microsoft licensing 'experts' did they finally agree on a price that I should pay
That's an interesting risk in itself. Imagine the entry in the corporate risk management system: "unsure if we are exposed to FAST gangsters or not due to lack of license clarity".. The issue seems to be one of interpretation, and any lawyer can tell you that that is where it all gets *really* expensive..
Educational pricing was always cheaper, at least for MS software as well as Novell software. In higher-ed, eh, we're not afraid of *NIX, so MS knows they have to cut deep or we'll make everyone use VT-220 terminals again. ;)
And I seem to recall there was a large price increase in MS-SQL late last year, even for EDU. Not sure what the reason was, other than MS needed more money. Luckily, I haven't needed 2012 yet, as 2008 is still doing what we need.
Licencing a private cloud is getting better, but only for System Centre and Windows Server, can we see something more flexible for other products - e.g. Office Cloud Suite - which would licence any physical server/CPU for all the backoffice products (SQL, Exchange, Lync, Sharepoint, Project, etc...) so I don't need to provide rules on my cloud to nail VMs to licenced hardware.
Also do away with the silly rules about who can then use the software - we're a University, and would like to host a few servers for a College we support, but the licencing for that is a mess - so we'd have to run a seperate cloud licenced with their software just to run these - PITA.
Ask yourself this, will you still be using MS software if they comply with absolutely none of your requests?
If the answer is yes, then they have absolutely no reason whatsoever to implement any of your suggestions. You are locked in, and you will take whatever crap they throw at you. They don't care about existing customers because they know they won't lose them, they only care about getting new customers and new markets.
From a legal standpoint, home and educational licences are also limited versions. You are expected to use the software to either learn about the product or to learn how to use the product. They specifically do not include the right to use the software for commercial purposes. So, one could argue that the massive difference in pricing is to allow commercial usage. Though I seriously doubt the companies that use this strategy overlook the above factor either.
Note that these pricing differences are common across many types of software; they're not just limited to Microsoft products. Adobe and Autodesk come to mind.
I really pity you in your current situation!
You have nothing better left than kneeling in front of Microsoft, and clearly explaining all your thoughts most reasonably, and understandable, and throw in a sweetener frequently: "I am willing to pay exorbitant amounts!"
How does that feel? It must feel terrible, I am afraid, like crime victim continuously begging the perpetrator to accept all sorts of wealth, money and jewelry, to let him go, just let him go.
Hello, dear, there is no real need for you to use pay as a bribe to get what you reasonably demand. For those horrendous sums, you can even pay (e.g. me) for a planned exercise in migrating software; and offer a lot of training to your users on software that is free as in beer. Plus, hopefully, as well free as in 'libre'.
Ok Eadon, we would like to take you up on that offer.
I would like a replacement for Outlook implementing emails (the easy bit) as well as calendars and tasks to at least equivalent functionality as office 2003 & exchange (at a decade old, it's not too much to ask for?)
Acceptance is based not upon IT Professionals, but the end users who couldn't give a rats ass about if the software is from Microsoft or not.
The simplest and perhaps the best solution for VDI licensing is to create an OS-CAL, similar to the existing RDS-CAL. The OS-CAL would grant a named user the right to use any Microsoft OS for company business. Let us decide on the back end whether to use Windows 8, Terminal Services or XP, physical or virtual to support that user. Then business has a fixed cost per employee to budget for the OS and I don't have to worry if what I am doing is legal or not.
I have a request Microsoft:
Make an AD object specifically for MAB, so I don't have to create bogus User accounts made from MAC addresses with reduced password complexity under AD just to use MAB with NPS and AD.
Second request:
Allow NPS to point to DHCP and if a reservation exists in the same subnet in DHCP with the same MAC as the MAB client request, then allow it. (you made it go the other way [NPS can tell the DHCP server not to allow an IP to be given out], but not this way [DHCP reservations authorizing NPS], what were you thinking?)
Do they not have non-802.1x devices in your organization? It can only be one of three things, 1) Microsoft allows 8 character passwords for the AD accounts, or 2) Microsoft use a third party RADIUS software for their MAB. I guess maybe 3) they have no port security or simply use switch only based port security.
It took Microsoft 10 years to allow me to right-click on a DHCP lease and convert it to a reservation, how long is it going to take for them to figure out those requests.
P.S. Bring back the "File Explorer", Search Window/Box, and the Start-menu from XP to Windows 8, oh and a working WiFi interface (one that doesn't lock up my router, or require me to "Troubleshoot" every time my computer is turned on. And one where I can change the priority of stored connections).
Another idea? Useful product lifetimes.
There is no earthly point in actually getting training or certification for a product that gets replaced after 3 years, because it takes a year or two to find out if the flaws in the new OS/Program are getting fixed, and therefore if people are deploying it in numbers sufficant to make getting training and certification in that system worthwhile.
And either reduce upgrade pricing to make it viable to upgrade an entire network in one go, or quit fucking around with compatibility between one version of a product and the next so SME's can upgrade through buying new boxes through dell/hp.
Dear oh dear! I suppose it could all be worse though... Imagine if there was no Microsoft and the only alternative was ugly, cumbersome and inefficient free and "Libre" software.
I suspect that's the real reason why schools and educational institutions stay away from "Libre office" er al. It's just too darn awful for even a user who's just learning!
Question: Am I the only one????
#1. Its not just Win8, why did MS never include a simple EXPERT / NOVICE mode toggle switch for all its UI?
I'm bored having to expend the same wasteful energy troubleshooting computers whether its helping out girlfriends, friends or neighbors every time they have a PC problem or buy a new one :-
A. Uncheck hide extensions for known file types.
B. Change all default file folder views to DETAILS view!
C. Show hidden files and folders.
D. Hide unused folders in the left-pane of explorer and expand necessary ones etc.
E. Disable bland security notifications and endless tray icon balloon notifications.
F. Change System settings to 'Adjust for Best Performance'.
#2. Why is there no toggle button for a Safe PC Mode i.e. OS wide PRIVATE-MODE where the following are all disabled :-
A. All SCHEDULED TASKS including Facebook Voice, Google, Adobe, Java Updaters.
B. All browser add-ons & plug-ins in all installed browsers especially the most cracked: Flash & Java!!!
C. All unnecessary SERVICES especially the most hacked: VNC Server, MS SQL, Remote Access RDP.
D. All Registry Run / Runonce key commands.
E. All Pointless windows sounds.
F. All Remote Access.
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