The customer is always right… eventually
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Loading ...Microsoft – rightly or wrongly – has the reputation of being The Bully of the software industry. As it is the largest software company in the world, it often attracts the ire of its competition, the media pundits, and a scattering of computer-related user groups. It has been accused of ruthlessly destroying competitors simply because it desired to go after that market (look no further than Word Perfect, Netscape and NetWare from the 90’s). Microsoft has even been blamed for ignoring and dismissing the concerns of its own customers – anybody ever hear of the “Save The XP Campaign” (http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/savexp)?
Microsoft is well known for releasing a “good enough” product, undercutting competitor pricing, and throwing the marketing war engine into overdrive. When Microsoft focused its efforts on the hot emerging Virtualization industry some 3 to 4 years ago, they didn’t have a product that was even close to good enough, and the industry largely ignored “Virtual Server” and “Virtual PC” even with the no-charge price tag. With its modus operandi largely ineffective, they pulled out two monopolistic aces from up their sleeves: licensing and support.
Too be fair, Microsoft was not the only one to use those same two tricks. In fact, the “running our software on a virtualization platform is not officially supported” statement was a favourite with many software development companies. Microsoft did take this a step further, however. Before the introduction of the Hyper-V beta, you could get official support from Microsoft if you installed their applications on the problematic and unstable virtualization platform Virtual Server 2005 RC2.
Licensing was even nastier. A virtual machine running a Windows OS could not be moved from one physical machine to another physical machine more than once every 90 days. At first glance, that doesn’t look all that bad, especially when Microsoft points out that this restriction applies to their virtualization platform, too. However, a major drawback of Microsoft’s virtualization suite is the lack of “live migration” feature – that is, moving the “running instance” of a virtual from one physical server to another without any downtime. Everybody else in the game had this option, and this effectively meant that the only way to legally use live migration more than once every 90 days was to buy a license for each physical host. If your virtual data center had three physical hosts that were capable of live migrating of a Windows virtual machine amongst themselves, you needed three licenses even though you were only using one instance of the software. And if you were running a Microsoft application on said Windows virtual machine – like Exchange – you needed three of those licenses, too.
These extra little knife twists from Microsoft were so ingenious that Larry Ellison’s gang at Oracle did the same thing with their virtualization platform (yes, even Oracle has a virtualization platform).
Not surprisingly, Microsoft customers that had invested heavily in those other virtualization technologies – including myself – were outraged. Each trade show I attended I made a point to corner a helpless booth attendant from Microsoft and complain. Every consultant that came into my company and had the “Microsoft Gold Certified Partner” logo on their business cards heard my opinion on the matter. In fact, I still vividly remember calling up my Microsoft licensing manager – who is actually a great guy to deal with and has helped me out of numerous jams – and letting him know in no uncertain terms how I felt about these two issues. For nearly 2 years I felt my pleas, and similar pleas from fellow sys administrators, fell on deaf ears.
Then suddenly those pleas were heard. Microsoft announced major changes to the way they license nearly all of their back-office applications starting in September. Gone is the 90 day live migration restriction. And while the “non supported virtualization platform” stance isn’t eliminated, with Microsoft’s Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (officially allowing Microsoft applications running on non Microsoft virtualization platforms), the support obstacle has been drastically reduced. As licensing at the best of times is extremely complex, I suggest reading Chris Wolf’s blog post http://www.chriswolf.com/?p=184 for a much more in-depth discussion of the impact of these changes.
So thank you, Microsoft, to listening to your customers and making the changes that we had asked for. And if my Microsoft rep is reading this post, thank you for taking the brunt of my venting sessions, and for still answering your phone when I call.
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