Microsoft's Licensing Model (sigh)
One of my biggest, most important responsibilities in my day job
is ensuring that we have purchased all of the software licenses
that we require. It's my job to ensure that we are 100% legal at
all times - which fulfills one of our corporate goals to be a
completely ethical company.
Most companies make it very simply for me and my staff. If I
want to license Norton Antivirus, all I need to do is count the
number of machines on which the product is to be installed,
write up a purchase order and call the salesperson to order the
product. It works the same with Conversion Plus, Adobe
Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, WinZIP and any of the other hundreds
of products that we require to keep our company in business.
You would think that Microsoft would want to make it easy for
people like me to give them money. I know that if I were in
their shoes that's what I would do.
I should stop for a minute and explain that I love many
Microsoft products. Windows 2000 (server and professional) are
very solid, well-thought-out operating systems, and the Office
2000 suite is easily the best in the industry. Internet Explorer
is far superior to Netscape and has been for several years now,
and Visio 2000 is one of the most versatile flowcharting tools
available anywhere.
Unfortunately, purchasing and licensing Microsoft products is
nowhere near as pleasurable as using their office suite. My god,
they make it so difficult to purchase licenses that I've often
considered (especially recently) switching the entire company to
Unix and WordPerfect just to simplify my life.
Okay, let's take the Office suite of products. In a sane world,
you would do this one of three ways:
- You could just buy everything (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint
and so on)
- You could purchase the "base" kit, then purchase additional
licenses for the pieces that you needed. For example, spend $75
on the base, then add $40 for Word, and perhaps $10 for
PowerPoint, and then don't purchase Access. This could all be
done with a licensing key.
- Just purchase each piece separately.
Naturally, Microsoft didn't choose any of these methods. What
you have instead is a number of "suites", each a different mix
of products. For example, if you just need Word and Excel, you
could purchase Office Standard. If, on the other hand, you also
need Access, then you need to purchase Office Premium. To make
matters even worse, depending upon how many of each product you
want to purchase you can use different discount scales.
It's enough to make one pull his hair out in frustration. But
wait, it gets even worse with the operating systems. You want
Windows 2000 server, then you need to purchase a license for the
server, a license for each workstation (Windows 2000
Professional) and a Client Access License (CAL) for each
workstation that needs to access a server. And, of course,
depending upon how many of each you buy you get a different
discount scale.
Oh, we're not finished yet. You also have the choice of ordering
Backoffice, which contains many of the server products sold by
Microsoft. It may (or may not) be cheaper to get one Backoffice
license than, say, an Exchange license, a SQL license and a
Windows 2000 server license. Then you've got to remember if you
purchase Backoffice or the separate products for your server in
order to purchase either Backoffice CALs or the individual CALs
for each product. And, of course, each product has it's own
discount scale depending upon how many you purchase.
Now, with the impending release of Windows XP and the release of
Office XP, it has, believe it or not, got even more confusing.
Take a deep breath and see if you can follow this. We purchased
some 500 copies of Office 95, which we upgraded to Office 97,
then upgraded to Office 2000. We looked carefully at Office XP
and quickly decided we did not want to install it on any of our
systems. We are happy with Office 2000.
However, we might want to upgrade to the version of Office
following that, or even the one after that (Microsoft seems to
be releasing a new version every couple of years). In the past,
we would simply pay an upgrade fee to go from wherever we were
to the new version.
No more. Now, we have to purchase what is basically upgrade
insurance by a particular deadline (it was September but this
seems to have been moved to February). We also have to pay to
upgrade everything to Office XP at the same time. If we do not
do this, we will wind up paying over 200% more if we decide to
upgrade at some point in the future.
Okay, so Microsoft is forcing us to pay now for a product which
we may or may not want in the future. Personally, I believe they
know that Office XP is not a product which most people want - in
fact, I don't know of any system manager anywhere who is even
considering upgrading to the new version. Why not? The user
interface is significantly different (requiring retraining), the
performance is poor (requires more hardware to operate) and the
benefits TO THE USER are completely nonexistent.
It gets worse. We have decided to go ahead and get the upgrade
insurance and upgrade our product on paper. However, we
definitely do not want to install Office XP on any machine at
any time. Thus, we simply want to make the purchase to retain
our rights to upgrades in the future.
We are allowed to install the older versions as much as we want
under the terms of the license agreements as long as we purchase
enough licenses of the new version to cover it all. So we went
to purchase Office XP Professional, then found ourselves in an
interesting position.
We originally bought the Professional edition because we wanted
Publisher. Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided to remove
Publisher from Office XP Professional (in fact, they have also
removed Frontpage - no huge loss considering that Frontpage XP
is not an improvement over 2000).
This introduced lots of confusion into the picture. After much
study and hours of phone discussions with Microsoft, we
determined that we could install Office Professional 2000 with
Publisher for each of the Office Professional XP licenses that
we purchased. If, however, we did upgrade to Office Professional
XP, then we would need to purchase one additional Publisher
license per machine.
It would be so much easier if we could just purchase 500
licenses for Word, 500 for Excel and 500 for Publisher. We would
be happy to purchase a maintenance agreement for the whole mix.
We don't need Access or PowerPoint, yet due to the way Microsoft
has it all structured we have to purchase licenses for them.
Sigh.
Now I have to go figure out how to upgrade and license my
Windows NT and Windows 2000 machines. It's enough to make me
look into the mirror to see if I have any more gray hairs.