Microsoft continues its market consolidation with price increases (and more to come). Who is surprised? In recent weeks, many Microsoft customers have felt outraged and blind-sided by Microsoft’s price increases and licensing changes for SQL Server and the System Center suite of management tools. Sadly, Microsoft’s actions are predictable, and consistent with their past behavior. NET(net) has long advised its clients that Microsoft’s long-term product bundling strategies are designed to help weaker products gain market share and adoption, until sufficient critical mass is reached that Microsoft can reap profits by raising prices and ...
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As expected, cloud computing is entering a price war phase, with Amazon and now Microsoft dropping prices recently. In this case, MSFT lowered prices for Office365 and for Azure only online storage costs. This marketplace has all the indicators of a classic technology cycle. Every week we are seeing press releases about new cloud capacity coming on-line; and suppliers of all categories are striving full speed to embrace this model in some way. What’s justifying all of this investment? A large part is the prospect of increasing customer lock-in. While CFO’s are enticed with the idea of variable cost structures, the cloud suppliers are ...
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Another dust-up in the news lately regarding a service called “OnLive” offering a full Win7 / Office experience to iPad users. It seems pretty clear that what customers really want is the Windows / Office experience on any platform, anywhere, and streaming (“VDI” by some definitions) seems like a reasonable way to do that. But, Microsoft prohibits that, at least in the way that OnLive implemented it. They are so serious about getting the word out that Joe Matz, Worldwide VP for licensing, posted a blog entry calling out OnLive by name: ...
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Microsoft is offering a new add-on option to Premier Support Agreements, called “Cloud Vantage Services.” The offering appears to be designed to address the most common customer concerns about Office365. For early-adopter customers, a service such as Cloud Vantage could serve to reduce the risk of adopting Office 365, smooth the transition and help the organization manage the change to a different way of infrastructure delivery. But this service also is an acknowledgement that “all at once” Office365 adoption is fraught with risk. Further, Microsoft has traditionally left this type of hands-on integration work to Partners. Even the PDF ...
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RCP Magazine has posted a very handy update to Microsoft’s upcoming product release plans. This is of special interest to customers who are planning Enterprise Agreement (EA) or Software Assurance (SA) renewals in 2012. http://rcpmag.com/articles/2011/02/01/the-2011-microsoft-product-roadmap.aspx Note that Windows 8, Office 15, Windows Server8 , and Exchange 15 release dates have slipped from the previous guidance – now expecting late in 2012 or early 2013. My bet is that Microsoft will make sure that Windows 8 releases in time for Christmas. This means that we should start seeing PC OEMs announcing coupons and/or free upgrade guarantees for ...
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