Restrictive licensing keeps businesses grounded in cloud vendor vortex New research is highlighting the restrictive licensing practices deployed to prevent businesses from switching cloud providers. A study, conducted by Savanta and funded by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA Europe), surveyed 1,242 IT decision-makers in France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK …
It the issue that there is zero cost to Microsoft to provide Azure customers with Windows, Office or any other Microsoft software license, even if they put it down as a cost for accounting purposes they aren't charging themselves a license fee for their own software. Where as any other cloud provider is having to charge that fee or absorb the cost themselves to stay competitive.
Now sure other cloud providers do this with their own software too,but the problem i MS have a huge monopoly on the desktop and office productivity software space that other cloud providers can't compete with on a level playing field.
Literally untrue.
There were Windows phones long before either Apple or Android Inc. (let alone Google) had anything to offer.
The problem is that they weren't very good. By which I mean that Windows Mobile wasn't very good. This is why smartphone manufacturers avoided it like a cliché. I had a Handspring Treo (palmOS), and it was excellent. All my managers had Blackberries, which they claimed were excellent too,
Apple lucked it with a resistive touchcreen and the realisation that this meant you could dispense with the physical keyboard. Then they completely destroyed everyone else by beating mobile networks over the head with the dominance of iPod (remember them) and threatening no iPhones unless they offered sensible data plans. To those with Apple kit, natch.
It's a shame that we have to thank Steve Jobs for pervasive cellular connectivity, but a fact nevertheless. Thanks, Steve. iPhone, no thanks.
-A.
"Apple lucked it with a resistive touchcreen and the realisation that this meant you could dispense with the physical keyboard. "
No iPhone ever had resistive touchscreens. And there was more to the original iPhone than just the form factor. The screen and UX was miles better than what any other phone offered at that time (and not to forget, the day Apple presented the iPhone Google's plan for Android was still a Blackberry-style phone with hardware buttons!).
It was also the only phone which didn't come with crapware from network providers.
You are quite right, I meant capacitative. My Treo had a resistive touchscreen. You could tap it with a (single) finger, but it was much better with the supplied stylus.
As for the UX, well, that's subjective, but I found PalmOS to be far more intuitive than anything else I've used subsequently on mobile. And the physical keyboard just runs rings around anything on-screen.
Apple was very good at exploiting its dominance of the music-player market to take the smartphone world by storm, but really, the 1st generation iPhone was nothing special compared with the competition, capacitative screen excepted. I would take a physical keyboard any day.
-A.
"MS phones died because Apple and Android already had a duopoly."
Nonsense. MS phones died because of Microsoft. Which, despite the fact that they already had years of experience with Windows Mobile, managed to bork up the Windows Phone platform through a series of really horrible design decisions and poor execution. They lied to people regarding the upgradeability of WP7 phones to WP8, they were slow to implemented features and capabilities, and with WP10 went even many steps backwards. Then they cancelled Windows Phone because they got bored of it.
What killed Windows Phone was Microsoft's incompetence.
Windows is only a small minority of the cloud market—most of it is Linux. This fact alone shows that Microsoft’s restrictive licensing, instead of bolstering its own position, is simply hastening the demise of Windows.
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