Microsoft Unbundles Software For NY City 131
doishmere writes "Microsoft has agreed to sell individual pieces of software to NY City workers, rather than forcing each seat to buy a full suite of software. The city has created three classes of users based on which pieces of software they need to perform their job, and Microsoft will sell software packages tailored to each class at a reduced price."
The Key Is (Score:4, Insightful)
Getting money for something someone else has done. The NYC employees uses a Mac or LibreOffice, it matters not, Microsoft still collects.
Re:Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
It's impressive that you typed that well thought out post (your first post, no less!) all in one minute after the story was made public, despite lack of a subscriber account. It's almost like you knew beforehand that this story was going to appear and wanted to get some pro MS sentiment in before anyone else had a chance to say anything..! How much were you paid for that, exactly?
Re:NY is a freakn corrupt cesspool (Score:1, Insightful)
Big cities are shit by nature.
Re:Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends. Are you posting comments praising it that are unrelated to the topic?
Re:Clippy says: (Score:5, Insightful)
We have seen how this company operates over many years.
Saying something nice is fine, posting an obvious premade shill piece is not.
Re:Conveniently unbundles... and rebundled. (Score:1, Insightful)
If this includes developer tools, Exchange, AD, etc, then 500 per person average sounds about right.
Re:Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
No. Microsoft giving customers a reasonably well packaged offering is the news item.
If you want to praise someone for this you ought to praise the existence of macs, linux, openoffice.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Clippy says: (Score:4, Insightful)
That's actually a really good point. I suspect there may be a correlation between age and views about MS. In fact, I'm sure that luring in young developers (counting on them not knowing MS history) is on their agenda.
Over the past 15 years, I've gone from pro-MS to agnostic to "avoid when possible" based largely on their behavior. But young developers don't know about DR-DOS, Netscape, MS JVM, or even the recent OOXML fiasco. So for those that don't understand the reasons for the seemingly automatic negative responses, a single action doesn't eclipse an entire history or even come close to meaning that they've "changed" as the shill put it.
If MS wants to gain respect, they've got to consistently play nice. That means supporting standards instead of trying to own them. That means playing nice instead of trying to lock out competitors with their monopolies. But I really can't see this happening unless they are broken up or they lose enough market share so that they're forced to compete on merit. They're too addicted to their current business of locking in customers and leveraging their monopolies.
What exactly is new here? (Score:3, Insightful)
For sufficiently large customers or groups of customers, it has always been possible to get special offers from Microsoft. I think the city of New York qualifies for this category.
For comparison:
In the early 90s, Microsoft created the XP Corporate edition that does not need activation, to appease large customers who were worried about losing the ability to install their copies of XP.
Later, Microsoft shared source code with some universities and government agencies to counter the advantage of Open Source in being more accessible for security audits.