Sun Introduces Subscription Solaris 144
cyberlync writes "Sun is planning to implement a pricing policy similar to Microsoft's recent subscription pricing plan. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president of software, said that they are calling this project Orion. It looks like another attempt to grab more cash in this nasty economy to me. Schwartz said that they are going to try a similar senario with linux soon as well. On a side note, it mentions some interesting things about a new desktop distro of linux."
news for linux (Score:3, Interesting)
2)
3) profit!
Okay, so Sun will have profit. Will they put more effort into Linux or will they try to increase profit by minimizing costs (volunteers are so cheap...)?
The rationale being... (Score:2, Interesting)
No doubt they have got many customers with sizeable investments developed on Sun technology, and I suppose Sun wouldn't make such hard terms as Microsoft did, but nevertheless, you can only price your way when it's a sellers market, or a really captive one. If not, your are dead meat. None of those situations currently apply. Just think it again, Sun.
no surprises (Score:4, Interesting)
There's also interesting discussion in there and here about the company's dependence on proprietary, expensive hardware in today's world of home 192-node beowulf clusters.
Makes perfect sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that Sun is offering Linux, they will need a way to break out the costs, so that customers that prefer Linux might be offered a price break over customers that prefer Solaris for specific tasks. For instance, webservers and app servers might see no real need for any additional costs for Solaris, but a 75 CPU database server might want the additional features.
This method also provides the capability of pricing support appropriatly. I know, you MS people might not be familiar with this concept, but Sun has been providing support for their OS for years, and not charging by the hour when you call with a problem. Sun bundles OS and hardware support into one number for low end systems. Again, by breaking the pricing out, different support costs can be offered for the different OSes.
Sun support has always provided, cumulative patch sets that can often be applied without reboots. <rant>I built a W2K box yesterday and had to boot over 7 times after the initial install of the OS as I applied various patches. It took me most of the morning to get all the patches installed. I pay for this support so that I can call up a technician that has the resources available to answer my questions. Sheesh
Mad Hatter project is more interesting (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmmm...OTOH, maybe they could do what MS has done with the server/desktop line - only with more reliablity and less cost. Imagine a server that can be scaled to nearly infinite (128 CPUs anyone?) levels and never goes down! Then put a Linux desktop in front of it running lots of GPL stuff (to keep the costs down) and built-in Java.
And, as another poster put it, Sun has been giving back to the community for a very long time (i.e. NFS). Maybe this could work. I would love to not have to worry about my servers all the time ("Did it reboot overnight!?!") and get on with creating business solutions for my employer.
Metered Billing? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's another side to this whole subscription issue - or 'metered billing' as it's referred to in the article. The industry is trying to steer us towards a subscription rather than purchasing model - i.e. you pay for Windows by the year, rather than buying it outright. In the case of operating systems and server apps, this equates to more revenue for the vendor and a more stable long-term business model - but what about desktop applications?
I'm primarily an ASP/.NET coder, but I do the odd bit of content creation - mainly images and animations for web sites. I run my core apps (OS, email, browsers, text editors) every day. About once a week, I'll fire up Corel Photopaint for an afternoon or so to make up some buttons or something. I use Microsoft Access for two days every quarter, to perform updates to a clients' database.
This means over the course of a year, I use Photopaint for about two hundred hours and Access for eight days. Yet I (or rather my employer) has paid the same price for these applications as someone who uses them all day, every day. There are applications - Photoshop springs to mind - which I don't use at all, because they wouldn't get used frequently enough to justify the cost of the licenses. But if we could pay for these apps on a per-usage or daily basis - actual 'metered billing', the same as water or electricity or bandwidth - they'd become cost-effective. Not to mention the vast number of people who just pirate applications 'cos they only use them occasionally and they're not prepared to pay for it.
Ok, this is highly unlikely because it means less money for the software companies, and if open software continues to improve as it has in the last few years, it'll be redundant before long anyway. But it would make an interesting angle for companies trying to convince their users of the merits of the subscription model.
Re:Beige box PC's ain't no good (Score:4, Interesting)
1. As far as I know, Sun tried to license NFS. Failed. For various reasons. Do not try to pull that "give to the community crap" at least as far as NFS is concerned.
2. Solaris (not SunOS) NFS support until 2.6 was crap. Many patchlevels even as late as 2.5.1 had quite a few data corruptions bugs. As a result most old non-academic installations actually used NetAppliance when they needed NFS.
3. I had to be a design authotity on something like 100+ Netra T1s with Solaris running the most elementary services like DNS, news, mail, etc. None of them running more then one service so they were not even loaded. And frankly I have not seen so many hardware failures and memory leaks in the core OS anytime before and anytime after. Basically white boxes from a bandit corner shop have lower failure rate and most linux kernels in the 2.3.x and 2.5.x series were more reliable.
4. If you have created a website that needs one 100+ CPUs box instead of having the load spread across several redundant systems you should be fired on the spot. Frankly, have you ever heard of single point of failure? Actually, have you heard of dot.bomb? There were some sites like "The Street" which tried this technological model. All of them failed and dragged several decent ISPs which decided to cater for this model with them.
Gives releases with no real content (Score:4, Interesting)
I once (ca. 10 year ago) worked for a firm that sold a program for a yearly subscription (you didn't own the program - you leased the right to use it). It removed the focus of the management from the product to a degree were it almost wasn't supported anymore. There wasn't any pressure from dismissing sales as we lived almost on subscribtion alone.
But once a year a month or so before next year subscription was due I was told quickly to prepare a new release with the sole purpose of giving the impression that our customers did get something for their subscription. Management didn't care what it contained as long as I didn't take to long.
AFAIK most of our customers didn't use the upgrade because it didn't really add anything worthwhile anyway.
I hate to say this, (Score:5, Interesting)
The way I see subscription-based software working is that there's an introductory price (say, $150) for the basic OS and a year of updates. After that year is up, you can choose to continue the subscription at a maintenance rate of $50/yr, or you can stop maintenance and not get any updates. You still have a valid license for the OS, you just can't install any new updates. Once you go off maintenance, you need to pay the full introductory price to get back on.
Everyone wins in this case: OS vendors get a steady stream of income, users of current PC's get timely updates for not much more than they pay now for OS updates, and users of older PC's don't have to pay a yearly tax just to run an outdated OS.
If Apple had pitched .Mac this way, I might have bought it. (With the extra stuff .Mac offers, it would have to cost a little more, of course).
Of course, this plan will never work, because software companies are not looking at subscriptions as a way to charge the same amount but even out their cash flow. They are looking at it as a source of revenue growth. Which means that instead of $150 and $50/yr, which is closer to what they get now ($150 every two or three years for the major OS update) we'll see more like $300 and $20/mo. And that would be bad.
S/W subscription could be done in the rigth way (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, an ideal software subscriptions model should be done for the customers, not against them, that is :
Re:MS Compatible Linux Desktop OS (Score:1, Interesting)
Orion is much more (Score:1, Interesting)