Investorts are the answer to your question of course
And they, as always, are myopic and have such a very hard time seeing past their next quarterly earnings statement.
The idea of offering a one time discount that will then effectively double the cost per core is practically revolutionary thinking to their kind. It involves thinking across more than four(!) quarters. What customer could possibly be that clever?
In reality most of us were getting fleeced for a support contract, and using the attached upgrade rights, so we were already on the treadmill of revolving fees. This is just a pretext to drive up the TCO to cover the cost of acquisition. One of what will become an endless treadmill under new owners.
I suspect many of those small accounts for the new "standard" subscription could port over to HyperV as readily. The tooling isn't pretty, and M$ keeps breaking stuff in patches, but if you were running windows workloads anyway, it might be a saner play then the "what's around the next bend" roller coaster that VMware is on right now. If M$ got it's act together now it could even grab some market share, but let's not hold our breath right?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
