Microsoft's on-prem Exchange and Skype for Business Server go subscription-only Microsoft has made Subscription Editions (SE) of Exchange Server and Skype for Business Server generally available, marking an end to year-numbered versions. Redmond has cut it fine for the updates. The previous versions, Exchange Server 2019 and Skype for Business Server 2019, are due to drop out of extended support on …
All this is fine while your customers are afloat and growing.
But when times are hard. Forced payments like this will send people out of business. They won't be able to tick over and not invest in the hard times. They will be more likely to shut down. You cannot exist without email these days.
It's starting to happen in the US. These bastards obviously don't care. But they might after it affects their bottom line and after the human impact is un recoverable.
Adobe behaviour is more significant to small agencies. But there are eplent of struggling SMEs at the moment. Microsoft _should_ care about keeping them afloat
"You cannot exist without email these days."
I suppose it depends on what the subscription rates are. Outside of the freebie* gmail/$WhateverMicrosoftCurrentlyCallsIt/ISP service it's reasonable to pay for a email - it costs the MSP to provide it - and the ISP provided service isn't really free anyway.
A bare service using POP3, delete on download isn't going to cost that much per seat but it means individual clients will be storing the emails otherwise you can always run Roundcube etc locally.
* As in -->
You're really paying in kind.
"The price increases do not apply to Microsoft's cloud products: SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, or Microsoft Teams."
Of course not. Not as long as there is an on-prem option. As soon as that loophole is closed, THEN the prices will go up.
That MS share price isn't going to go up without 9,000 job cuts and draconian policies that remove end-user choice.
This about on-prem servers - where you can delay updates when the financial numbers are not OK, but still get updates. If a subscription means the code is rolled back to a previous versions, and no updates are available, you start to be in trouble.
MS & C. are shifting the entrepreneurial risk from them to their customers. They want a steady cash flow, so they don't have to research & develop new appealing versions, you will have to pay anyway.
And it looks more and more like protection money than anything else.
Anyway, bad timing by Nadella - the current situation is telling more and more customers cutting their ties with Exchange and Outlook is the right move, since Nadella is turning Outlook too into an Electron monster.
I’m struggling to see an easy way that MS ‘could’ roll the code back to a previous version on an on premise device (OK, I wouldn’t entirely put it past them to at least try) it has to be more trouble than it's worth. As I read it, if you stop paying then no more updates including security patches and your on-prem device is frozen at that point.
Now as per the level of QA testing that MS seems to have been employing recently, some might say that’s not a bad thing; but, as the article hints at it leaves you running technically unsupported software on business-critical devices and that could be a bit fat no-no for for some regulated industries, and even for others it will probably invalidate any cyber-security insurance they may have.
I’m sure that within a few months we’ll see all sorts of ‘hacks’ floating for getting updates for ‘unsupported’ servers, and some may even be ‘legit’. Although would many be able to tell the difference between that and some malware laden piece of code written by Kim Jung-un’s second cousin?
I’m guessing that the subscription edition will somehow want to check it’s still ok to provide service, so it’ll need to phone home likely a few times a year in the same way as Cisco already does. This is bad news for deployments where internet access is air gapped or at best highly undesirable. Given a significant part of their customer base is military and government, how are they going to mitigate that problem?
There are a number of sources for secure certificates (LetsEncrypt is one I have used in the past) where the cost of such a cert is low to free. If you are looking to setup a local mail server then you should be including DNS/DKIM etc etc as part of the basic build specifically to prevent such issues. A number of the larger platforms already block mail from sending servers not using such secure processes so making this a minimum start point.
You make a good point Mr D Spenser,
That said, there are plenty of ways to make sure your service is being presented as sound, Certificates, SPF, DKIM, DNSSEC as examples.
Pretty easy to set up in most cases.
IMHO MS et al. are reliant on the fact that core IT skills have been removed from most businesses, the IT departments aren't as large and ubiquitous, nor on prem in some cases (Offshoring) so these skills, or rather the lack of them, make you more reliant on MS Services and less able to move away from restrictive licencing models, which seem to be par for the course with most of them.
If we get some basic skills relearnt, ideally in house, you'll find very quickly that all the bolt ons and never ending storage, isn't worth the tie in and having a one stop shop, like MS, provide all your tooling.
Most places I've seen are desperately trying to smash a round peg into a square hole, to make their business model fit what MS say it should be!
I only now have a single client on Exchange, they are happy to take the risks and remain on that version for as long as the clients support it. Others have migrated to imap already rather than cough up per month
Before I get downvoted, it's their decision, I offered the imap option and that is still under review as thre's only a couple of users that use shared calendars / contacts
I'm sorry, if it's on-prem then your customers are the ones paying for the maintenance of their servers.
You're just making new shitty updates that regularly cause chaos and now you expect to get monthly tequilas out of other people's hard work?
Are you trying to push people to Linux ?
... because it can.
A couple of years ago, as IT manager I was tasked with reducing IT spend. This was when Adobe were moving everything to subscription only, and quite a hefty one at that (because of all the "AI" they were flinging).
With a bit of digging, worked out that for what the business was doing, there were 2 or 3 ways we could FOSS it and eliminate Adobe completely.
Until the users got upset that rather than "Adobe" on their cv, they'd have a billy-no-mates solution that was unmarketable.
(Personally, that would have made them more valuable, but who am I ?).
Anyway, after sticking with Adobe, they went bust. Which was a shame really, because I (and a team) had swapped out every last trace of subscription software in the backend.
"users got upset that rather than "Adobe" on their cv" ...
Weren't the sharpest tools then ?
Even yonks ago 90% of the average CV wouldn't have passed a polygraph test; common knowledge and in any case in the corporate milieu, plausible mendacity† is a valuable asset.
Once on their future employer's payroll they might plausibly claim they were previously provisioned with the very limited, or customised Billy Nomates‡ edition of the particular Adobe suite.
† "believable liar" not to be confused with pauperate mendicancy which is definitely never an asset.
‡ Gulielmus Sineamicis could sound better for an Aldus product.
Just get a dedicated Linux or BSD or even macOS box over in one corner and turn on bog-standard UNIX SMTP/POP/IMAP services and get your own certs and whatnot and go. (OS X Server is dead, but Courier https://www.courier-mta.org/ and others still work...) Or if that's too much work, go to one of the dozens of email hosting sites. (Zoho will be happy to help and don't charge anything nearly as much as MS, to name one...)
Exim + dovecot + roundcube on Debian. I have 30 servers like this. They work like a charm. But still more and more businesses decide to tie themselves to MS. I'm old, I'm tired of fighting against the subscription model and proprietary software and SaaS. If businesses like to become slave to MS, they can do what they want.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
