>Because Licensing EACH CORE is awesome!
I have some sympathy with IBM's position. Would you rather have different sku's and buy a whole new unit to upgrade capacity? When you pay for the additional capacity, you get a discrete and definite benefit - more cpu capacity. That's what the consumer wants.
I have less sympathy with software vendors doing this. especially when its based on physical cores in the box, rather than limiting the number of cores the software will run on. With hardware, you know the benefit you'll be getting. With software, there's an incentive to make your software run badly to increase core-count revenue. That's bad for the consumer. This is why I have an issue with "Appliances" which are just PC's which the vendor refuses to upgrade or turns end-of-life with no good reason. That's server appliances or mobile phones - both are examples of hardware which is often dumbed down for market segmentation and (unlike IBM's hardware licensing). It's worse at the server end of the market: they want you to buy all new software licenses as well as over paying for new hardware.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
