Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Oct 2009 17:50 UTC
Software licensing. As home users, it's already an incomprehensible mess of legalese that nobody cares one bit about. However - we home users have it easy. The situation for business users and people managing IT departments is even worse (proprietary software, mostly, of course). Microsoft is a major culprit in this regard, and while the company acknowledges that the situation is messy, they claim they can't really do anything about it.
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Member since:2006-01-12
They could simplify licensing by not having so many different version of the same thing. Let's start with Windows desktop. How about one version. I will concede two, one for home and one for business. Next we look at the server version. They don't need an Enterprise and Standard version. One version will be fine. Datacenter version I will let slide as a datacenter provides a different function. Office could be simplified into a standard and pro version. As for SQL Server. One for business and one for data centers. The best part is now Microsoft doesn't need to support so many different versions. They save money. Now we all know that you have full price users and those who qualify for discounts. Bam. Two licensing models. Next you throw in some Quantity discounts and your done. That's pretty simple.
And costly for small people. All these changes would mean that cost of cheapest would go up since development costs of those extra features would be added on those. Reason why we have limited versions is because it makes stuff cheaper.
Member since:
2007-01-18
They could simplify licensing by not having so many different version of the same thing. Let's start with Windows desktop. How about one version. I will concede two, one for home and one for business.
Next we look at the server version. They don't need an Enterprise and Standard version. One version will be fine. Datacenter version I will let slide as a datacenter provides a different function.
Office could be simplified into a standard and pro version.
As for SQL Server. One for business and one for data centers.
The best part is now Microsoft doesn't need to support so many different versions. They save money.
Now we all know that you have full price users and those who qualify for discounts. Bam. Two licensing models. Next you throw in some Quantity discounts and your done. That's pretty simple.