Re: Cashflow & tax rules
But, as we can expect additional concentration in the industry, we'll no doubt see potential savings on the manufacturers side only and further concentration of capital.
Yup. Generally these changes don't seem to benefit the customers. I 'buy' tin, I pay X for annual support/maintenance and the costs are easy(ish) to understand. I might even decide that after 5 years, I don't want to pay support any more and just replace kit as it breaks.
What I don't like is to 'buy' tin, and at some random point in the future it goes EOS/EOL and stops working, forcing an upgrade. Or having to allow tin to phone home to some licensing server or it stops working. Thus adding security risks in exposing that tin, or just having to depend on connectivity to a 3rd party server which I don't control.
But a couple of examples of suckiness spring to mind. Way back, I was evaluating Alcatel kit for a new network. It was nice stuff, and had a very nice OSS. But the OSS also came with licence 'credits' for doing MACDs. The cost of the kit was comparable to other vendors, but the uncertainty around having to continually buy credits made the opex hard to model.. Plus additional headaches wrt purchasing those.
Or more recently, I've been musing about setting up a machinists school. Partly so I can play with CNC machines, but also because I think it's a GoodThing(tm) to train future makers of things. So I looked at AutoCad, and discovered that was 'sold' with annual licences, and cloud 'credits' for doing rendering or CFD in the cloud. It wasn't clear if some functions could be done locally, because compute is relatively cheap or if it was forced into their cloud at $1 a credit. Plus additional complications. So classroom licences could be cheaper educational versions, but production might need commercial licences, and licence challenges taking something produced in educational into production. But trying to figure out opex on that gave me a headache.
But such is 'progress'.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
