First-world countries end up subsidizing the massive costs of drug development
I thought it was “Old World”, “New World”, “Third World”?
As a now fairly long reader I’ve often wondered about your Microsoft weakness. Their products don’t seem particularly better than the many open source alternatives, nor do they seem easier to use. All that, plus you get the joy of jockeying with their marketing approach. I don’t know. It seems a little dodgy to me. You’ve put your entire enterprise at the whim of a company known for making lousy decisions, for ruining industries, and for being blissfully unaware of what sorts of things would actually help their users.
Or, put another way: it’s kind of liking smoking and then complaining that the tobacco companies are heartless capitalists. Uh, duh? Who is enabling them to do that?
I can understand Microsoft wanting more money for an edition with more features, but only for features that cost Microsoft to produce. To overcome the natural addressable memory limit of 4GB limit on some of their 32-bit OSes, Microsoft added software features (the PAE kernel) and reserves the right to charge more for those fetures. However, 64-bit OSes have a much higher natural addressable memory limit, so additional work isn’t needed (to my knowledge anyway) for this memory to be available to applications. Therefore, in my opinion, the arbitrary 32GB limit amounts to price gouging. Charge me more for Active Directory or load balancing support, but get out of the way of my exabyte+ of memory.
Memory wants to be free!
Reminds me of the story of the business and consumer editions of an old HP Printer. They build the printer it prints so many pages a minute, thats the business version costing $$$$. They then pay engineers to design a doohicky to limit the printing speed and hey presto thats the consumer version costing $$ even though it actually cost more to produce.
Or in fact the older story of the first trams. The tram came out of the factory with a roof and nice seats they called them first class costing loads of dosh per ticket. Then they hire some guys with cutting torches to chop the roof off and rip out the nice seats these will be second class and cost not so much even though, you guessed it, the things cost more to produce…
“Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.”
I think you misspelled “time-consuming”.
If I choose open source I don’t have to think about licensing…
Ha! You have got to be kidding!!! Have you ever tried to figure out if you should be paying for MySQL or not? Most people just assume that they don’t have to pay for it. Some are right. A lot of them are dead wrong!
And don’t even get me started on GPL, LPGL, and on and on…
You also act like the ability to support more than 32GB of RAM is the only difference between Standard and other editions of the product. Guess again!
Finally, you mean to tell me you’ve been in the computer business this long and don’t understand that you always have to read the supported hardware configuration guides for all software? Why would you buy that much memory and not even know if your target OS can handle it?
I think the point of comparison with hosted services isn’t apples for apples but it still illustrates the concept of tiered pricing being applied everywhere. CPU and video card makers do the same thing and, in that case, we actually do buy the full physical product with a core or some GPU’s disabled. That would be a perfect example of a manufacturer selling the same product (albeit, altered) to different audiences at different prices.
I still can’t understand how Mac-fans sit firmly in the same circle as the OSS-fans when it comes to “tax-free” products. Apple charges one fair price for the operating system and then an enormous mark-up for the hardware, which is the only hardware technically allowed to run the software. I get the Linux arguments but I’ll take the “Microsoft-tax” over the, commonly overlooked “Apple-tax” any day.
Dammit, how come this is this first I’m hearing of stack overflow being available for our own nefarious purposes? I emailed you guys last fall!
Will have to sign up when sober…
If you lay all the versions of all the Microsoft products end to end they strecth all the way to the moon and back.
Think of the costs internally though, you have to develop and test all the different versions making sure they all do the slightly different things right.
And as you so rightly point out the mental overhead makes people switch, not even to open source but how about Apple! they know how to make it simple (okay so you really are paying for them to make it simple)
We had 32 GB, and we maxed that out 100%.
We added 32, and was chocked to see the result on startup. Lesson learned: Never install Standard on servers. The licensing difference is minor compared to the cost of upgrading.
@Owen: "MS doesn’t change the price based on whether you are rich or poor, they base the price based on what features you want. "
The rich/poor thing is the important thing here. The features are only the mechanism that they use to divide the rich from the poor. The expensive editions cost more because their added features are valuable to the rich, not because the features are hard to implement.
If you need 48 gigs you are running a big business, and therefore you can pay more. So they create an entirely artificial limit on the OS so that big businesses have to pay more.
Contrast this with a way more complex feature like text-to-speech. If you need that, then you are blind and probably can’t pay much, so it’s free.
I recommend reading Joel’s essay on this, it’s a real eye-opener if you haven’t thought about this stuff before. It happens everywhere, not just software.
Buy an XServe!
Yeah, buy an 1U server that runs an OS you have to pay $1K for that has such an enormous thread creation overhead, you’ll need twice as much hardware as Linux (or hell, even Windows) to just run the same thing. But it’s pretty. It has blue LEDs even! As an added bonus, it comes with an outdated version of Java in which Apple doesn’t even fix critical security issues for six months on end. What a value.
Don’t get me wrong, I write this from a MacBook Pro and I made my earlier post from my iPhone, but Apple still has ways to go before it reaches the level of Dell and HP running Linux.
We try our best to distance ourself from proprietary software. We have been successful so far but couple of exceptions. I am sure we will free ourselves from vendor lock-ins soon.
Before any new software we write we think of the following:
a) Can the software run on all major operating systems?
b) Does the software depend on a particular database?
c) Does the software depend on any proprietary software or web services?
d) Is it feasible to release the software under an open source license?
Ideally the answer would be yes for questions a and d. Strict no for questions b and c.
Nice way to market your new product “Stackexchange” 
@Steve - what were the opportunity costs - what might you have done with the 6 months yo uspent rewriting your code? That counts too.
Aren’t Microsoft just profiling their customers, what the average setup would be for those customers, and charging accordingly? I mean, an Enterprise is more likely to buy very high spec servers, and would subsequently potentially require more support etc? A small business is more likely to have more modest servers, and, of course, less money. So I’m not sure their decision making was as arbitrary as some people are making it out to be - they did their homework on what the average spec would tend to be in the price range they were targetting.
As you say, they are really subsidising the poorer customers, with the richer customers, but they do therefore have to make a distinction as to what the extra money is buying the richer customers.
Great blog, I’m just not convinced by this post which seems to be a case of not doing your homework properly on the server front 
I’m amazed that no-one has commented on that Eric Sink bloke. What a bastard! It seems the “greed is good” mantra is still alive and well.
I’m really not seeing the evil here. All MS are doing is offering different levels of functionality for different prices – giving customers the option to choose the features at a price that suits them. Isn’t this how the free market is meant to operate. (Not that I’m a fan of unrestricted free markets in all cases, but this seems innocuous).
“Sure, don’t make us customers think. Unless you want us to think about how much we’d like to pay you, that is.”
I may be naive, but I’d have assumed that anyone making a business decision as to what server to buy would be doing as much research as possible before handing over the money. Really, would MS be less evil if they forced you to always buy the most expensive version, even if it offered more than you could possibly need?
“Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.”
Really, so there’s no such thing as non-awesome open source software?