Windows 7 Licensing a "Disaster" For XP Shops 567
snydeq writes "Enterprise licensing for Windows 7 could cause major headaches and add more cost to the Windows 7 migration effort, InfoWorld reports. Under the proposed license, businesses that purchase PCs with Windows 7 pre-installed within six months of the Oct. 23 launch date will be able to downgrade those systems to XP, and later upgrade back to Windows 7 when ready to migrate users. PCs bought after April 22, 2010, however, can only be downgraded to Vista — no help for XP-based organizations, which would be wise to wait 12 to 18 months before adopting Windows 7, so that they can test hardware and software compatibility and ensure their vendors' Windows 7 support meets their needs. XP shops that chose not to install Vista will have to either rush their migration process or spend extra to enroll in Microsoft's Software Assurance program, which allows them to install any OS version — for about $90 per year per PC."
$90 per year per pc? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why isn't this program publicized? I am a small business and I have to tell you...the entire Windows licensing system is very very difficult to navigate. And I am 100% certain that is "by design". The more confused they can make me, the more money they can extract out of me and my company (or so they think).
In actual practice, I don't mind spending money where needed and $90/yr/pc seems about fair for a Windows OS.
Bonus points if someone can point me to a vendor who will sell it to me.
Software Rental (Score:4, Interesting)
M$ has finally came clean and declare that their users don't 'own' a piece of software, or for that matter, a perpetual license on a per system basis. Instead it's a rental license that must be renewed yearly. Failure to do so will result in deactivation and data loss.
Re:Or you know... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:ANY operating system? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why do you think it won't? It runs just fine on my Athlon XP 2800. It's simply a matter of installing an underlying DOS that can access modern large drives -- FreeDOS should do the job just fine.
Re:Or you know... (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft Will Cave (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:My entire shop is SuSE Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
That's nice.
I don't care. We run octo-core, quad-core, and dual-core machines that do real work and can't waste the CPU cycles on cruft that doesn't accomplish those goals.
Which means we're not "upgrading" to WinVista if we have to waste money on video cards we don't need.
Re:Or you know... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep. I don't want to switch to Windows 7. XP works just fine for Office apps, Firefox, Adobe reader, winzip a couple of proprietary apps and....that's it. The Devil's biggest trick was convincing the world that OS's need to be regularly upgraded to something very very different.
Would be happy to pay a reasonable sum for patches (done properly mind you, no larking about until Tuesday to get critical vulnerabilities out of the way), but having to either accept the costs of a mixed OS environment, or a large migration project for no benefit whatsoever, or pay extra for an old OS which is *still* supported really pisses me the fuck off.
Sigh, I guess this is the price we all pay for being reliant on a company which I suspect is past it's peak.
(On the subject of things that piss me the fuck off, I also hate it when you have to make an effort to decode marketing spiel to work out what a product does - I'm looking at you, VMWare.)
Re:Put on the fire-retardant suit, it's flame-time (Score:2, Interesting)
To be fair, XP is what, 8 years old now? Even though it's seen patches and service packs, the base code is still rather old. Furthermore, XP-64 is not exactly a go-to guy for good driver support.
Meanwhile, I bet your Ubuntu installation is from the last year, maybe two, and Linux x64 kicks the butt of XP 64.
Here's a question: how is Windows 7? You said you have the RC of it, but you didn't say how successfully it detected your hardware and that sort of stuff. I bet it did comparable to Ubuntu.
Re:My entire shop is SuSE Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
We tend to replace the video cards every 3-5 years, actually. Our monitors are mostly high-end LCD panels.
Re:Software Rental (Score:5, Interesting)
Viz: http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/9974/wtfiswrongwithslashdot.png [imageshack.us]
Re:$90 per year per pc? Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are the penalty fees still the same? last I heard it was the cost of the license with no discounts + (3*the cost of the license with no discounts) per machine. Say the license was $100 (to make the math easy) it would be $400 per machine. That can add up fast if you are a medium or large shop.
Re:$90 per year per pc? Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Or you know... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The whole thing is silly (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know, I stay away from purchasing TVs and other electronics because of reviews I read and personal experiences from other people's accounts.
People going from mac to windows are going to have the same problems that people going from windows to Linux usually do. Those problems are that it isn't the old OS they were using and things are done differently within it. If having to relearn things prevents a lot of Linux converts from staying with Linux, then I can't fault someone who doesn't want to do the same going from mac to windows.
Re:April plenty of time (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, good luck with that.
I recently tried out W7 RC for the first time, and put fallout 3 on there while I was at it. It's known as a glitchy game, but it ran OK.
Then, after about a day of play, the system ran the automatic update while I was playing. No problem. The following day when I tried to play, the game would randomly freeze every 5-10 minutes of play. I rolled the system back, systematically (damn nice, and absolutely necessary, feature, what with the likelihood that updates =will= break things) until I found the fault.
The fault was an update which was unremovable from within Windows itself and could only be removed through such a rollback. It was the first update performed, and the subsequent updates depended on it (apparently). Supposedly the update was to test whether W7 would update properly, and that alone - ie, supposedly no functional changes. Right.
Unless you are a school district... (Score:3, Interesting)
I work in a public school district and our flavor of SOftware Assurance costs much less than $90/PC - closer to $40/PC including a healthy selection of MS software (Office 2003/2007, the various shrinkwrap applications students use, etc.).
We save almost $150-200 per PC by not buying an OS pre-installed, and our typical hardware lasts about 5 years in the hands of our students, so the cost is essentially a wash (5x$40 = $200, which is aprox. savings of buying "blank" PCs from Dell), but we always have the ability to upgrade the OS/apps at will.
We plan on skipping Vista[0] and holding on to XP through the upcoming school year, then deploy Windows 7 on enduser desktops.
[0] Except for certain tablet laptops which only have drivers for VIsta...
Re:The power of lock-in (Score:3, Interesting)
On a side note, the year of the Linux desktop was about 3 years ago for me.
Re:The whole thing is silly (Score:2, Interesting)
You have a choice in your software you know, several in fact.
1. upgrade your client software to one that supports the new OS
2. change to a different client software that supports the new OS
3. don't upgrade to the new OS
4. consider virtualization tech and upgrade to the new OS
Have done many of #4 for different businesses, mostly things like PoS gear (using a central 2008 boxs running their PoS desktops on XP and their SQL server, and the client machines just mount them as virtual desktops), as well as some industrial gear (win98 machine that died performing its duty running a plasma metal cutter, imaged the HDD, run it under VirtualPC on vista).
Re:The whole thing is silly (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the problem with MBA's making IT decisions. This gets even worse when they start to throw around buzzwords like "cloud computing" when they don't actually understand what it means let alone the underlying technology (or risks/benefits of such technology). My work just started looking at outsourcing server infrastructure, IT determined that running out Exchange server in house was A$7,000 per year for 100 people (inc, content management, licenses, CALs, maintenance), to get even close to the same level of service with an external service provider we were quoted $12,000, up considerably from their initial promise of $10 per mailbox (they didn't include content management, archiving or whatever else could be charged for in their initial estimates) but management is still seriously considering this as the salesdroid is throwing around terms like TCO. In three years the Exchange server has had 6 hours of unplanned downtime, the internet connection has about 2-4 hours unplanned downtime each quarter.
I don't blame MS entirely for this, the entire establishment has been conditioned to surround themselves with the things that sound comfortable, MBA's and the like don't want to know about IT, they want to hear it in business speak as having to think about actual advantages, technologies and procedures hurts them, MS has geared themselves up to tell these people what they want to hear regardless of what they deliver.