This really is a fascinating problem. If Guise Bule gets his way the the maximum number of software licenses sold would be equivalent to the maximum number of concurrent users. I don't think that's particularly desirable for either developers or users.
A similar situation exists with video games. The market is going pure digital and gamers want the ability to sell "used" digital games. If that were possible then a middleman service would appear which would instantly "buy" and "sell" the game as you launched and closed a game. A wildly successful game such as Skyrim sells millions of copies but only had ~300,000k concurrent users (on PC) at launch. A couple of months later and that number is only ~50,000. Suffice to say this will never be allowed to happen.
This already happened for video games under similar circumstances with Internet cafes. These days the typical video game EULA prohibits use in Internet cafes without a special license, but as far as I know that has not been tested in court. The easier workaround from the developer and publisher's point of view is to just go online-only, which to a large extent has already happened, especially in Asia where gaming in Internet cafes is widespread.
Nice point! Valve has a special program just for cyber cafes (https://cafe.steampowered.com/index.php ). I have no idea how much it costs but you can pay some recurring subscription for access to a large number of titles. My impression is that most popular cafes pay this and it does very well for both Valve and the cafes.
"Add a wide range of 100+ popular titles to your catalogue.
We provide complimentary promotional materials and marketing support for your cafés.
We are happy to support for in-café tournaments and special events. Please let us know about your upcoming events.
All participants have access to the private Café Forums where they may discuss trends and issues in the cybercafé industry with fellow café owners and operators."
Once again Valve is showing the world how things should be done, is wildly successful, and nobody else seems to pay attention.
It shouldn't be such a huge issue to just meet your customer in the middle.
On the subject of second-hand digital licenses, some people I know (slightly, haven't spoken to in quite a while) created http://www.greenmangaming.co.uk a couple of years ago, built around this concept - no idea how they're getting on.
Though it's not nearly as pronounced; at least in the case of net cafes (absent any other licensing), there needs to be a copy for every game for every computer, which probably does add up to a decent amount of revenue per player hour for all except the Counter Strikes of the gaming world.
Discounted, but not to a $24 million for all Skyrim players degree (based on $80 a copy and 300k users peak).
I never understood how selling used digital games is illegal. It's certainly against the license agreement, but people have the right to sell their stuff and barter it, and game license keys are unique to each copy, which means they can be resold. Has anyone actually been found guilty of selling a "second hand" game, 'cause that's just ridiculous...
Ignoring the legal issue, second-hand purchase of software with license keys, particularly on ebay, is dangerous because those keys may be in use by other people. If the software uses an internet licensing server, it might disable itself because the key is already in use. Buying windows on ebay is a good example.
Ask you local school or corporate IT admin about their license server. Shared licenses are quite standard in the software. They tend to cost more than software with per-client-machine licenses though. The obvious (also standard) alternatives are per-user licensing (user accounts) , and non-user-transferable licenses locked to a client device with DRM (Hello, App Store).
If only game publishers understood that people pay £50 for a game at launch because they can sell it a bit later for at least £25. Used games spread the cost around, and the only way to stop it (or piracy for digital games) is to lower the cost.
The funny thing is the worst thing Microsoft could do to this is ignore them.... That would leave the issue unresolved, exactly what the Desktop as a Service people don't want.
I suppose the real question is if Microsoft's position on the desktop makes it illegal to do a favorable deal with On-Live? I am not aware if this would be illegal or not? One would think it would be at least against the spirit of the law to carve out a market niche for a microsoft "old boy" and protect it through their monopoly position... but it wouldn't surprise me if there is no regulation in place to stop this.
I am wondering what the shareholders think. They are refusing to license to most players in order to protect windows and office on the desktop. On the other hand they are giving up a new non-trivial revenue stream during the transition period. I would think a lot of investors would want to take the short term cash and run.
Having previously worked for Red Hat on the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization support team, it always was strange looking at the VDI products that it was SO SO expensive to run the infrastructure purely due to Microsoft Licensing. Microsoft don't want to loose the grip so they make VDI licensing difficult, instead pushing mixed virtualization where you need to run windows on your desktop as well.
VDI struck me as almost purely a windows solution. If your running linux you have a range of other options to have multiple users on a single infrastructure in a workable way without having hundreds of VMs.
LibreOffice's codebase is enormous and complicated. It's being cleaned up, but it may still be hard to maintain. It's doable, of course, but if you implement too much Office compatibility, you risk Microsoft suing you for some frivolous patent they keep just for the purpose of crushing LibreOffice when it becomes a threat.
It's interesting how the downvoting of comments critical to Microsoft is time-related (down trends around noon and midnight UTC, up trends shifted about 6 hours). One day I'll have to write a bot to check up/down votes and relate them to sentiment.
The biggest problem is that clients WANT Microsoft Office. You can offer them something else (Apple iWork, Lotus Symphony, Open Office, LibreOffice, KOffice). It can do everything they need and they will still argue that MS Office is what they want because of a myriad of factors (training, familiarity, computability, etc).
Some people might be able to shave off some customers, but you are going to have to have some killer feature (even if it is price).
I like your idea but you'd have to do some hard marketing work to get customers to use it in my opinion. That might not be cheaper than this lawsuit ;p
Well, I'm pretty sure all the money of those companies would not be enough to get LibreOffice to become 100% compliant with MS Office formats in a timely manner. Those formats represent decades of features, bugs, fixes and quirks that would have to be replicated in order to make sure that LibreOffice can replace MS Office in all its uses.
Let's assume it costs $5/month per instance of Office 2000-Whatever. It's really more than that with the MS ASP licensing, but let's use $5 for round number sake. Let's also assume they have 500K users using Office, also what I would consider a conservative number.
That's $2.5 Million/month in licensing costs alone. That pays for quite a bit of developer time.
The real question is, could Office be cloned for less than the user cost of Office? It almost certainly can't be cloned for less than Microsoft's cost to make Office.
No, but clearly people are wanting Microsoft to take the bait.. This is being backed by the Desktop as a Service providers who want to be able to deploy this.
Unlike trademarks to my knowledge there is nothing that devalues their offering by NOT suing, and instead suing other providers, at least until it gets large enough. Hell they even make money on each windows 7 license they need.
On the other hand, I really don't expect Microsoft to do this. It might take them years to bother to sue, but I see them taking it on simply because they can't turn a blind eye to piracy.
"Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal."
Such is the very first sentence of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Getting convictions can be a pain in the ass, and there are many things that could be violations but are not usually treated as such in practice, but the statute in theory is very broad, and the general principle is that actions which seriously harm competition in a market are unlawful. The acts do not have to be specifically enumerated in advance.
I am unfamiliar with many of the details of US laws, but does signing a special deal to offer a new product with 1 exclusive partner mean you have to offer it to everyone?
In the physical world many companies have patented processes that they don't offer to others.
I am not a lawyer, but I think unless there is existing case law there will be enough points for the case to go on for many many many years making the point moot.
> I am unfamiliar with many of the details of US laws, but does signing a special deal to offer a new product with 1 exclusive partner mean you have to offer it to everyone?
If the deal hurts competition in a market, the deal may be illegal, yes.
> In the physical world many companies have patented processes that they don't offer to others.
Which may or may not harm competition in an identifiable market. Compulsory patent licensing regimes are sometimes forced upon companies in the US as a result of antitrust action, and other countries sometimes have general compulsory licensing schemes that are always in effect.
Are you confusing "harming a competitor" with "harming competition"? They're not the same thing.
> I am not a lawyer, but I think unless there is existing case law there will be enough points for the case to go on for many many many years making the point moot.
Major antitrust cases always take years. Any major litigation takes years. The first AT&T antitrust case in the late 40s/early 50s took 7 years to settle, and the second one, which broke the company up, took eight. Those didn't even go to trial.
The lawsuit will take years while microsoft will make sure the litigants go bankrupt.
Unfortunately there primary businesses are based on selling Microsoft Software Services, and while it would almost certainly result in Microsoft being fined eventually... I am pretty certain they will do the same thing in the 90s and just kill the vendors who are going after them. Raise a few SKU prices for that kind of market, make the companies unprofitable.
You're very confused about how antitrust cases usually shape up, and how bankruptcy works.
First, assuming a private antitrust lawsuit is brought against Microsoft by a company that then enters bankruptcy proceedings, it is very possible the case would continue long after the company ceases ordinary operations. A lawsuit doesn't become moot just because one party is "dead".
Second, "the litigants" could ultimately end up including the US Department of Justice, various state attorneys general, the European Commission, and possibly other competition authorities around the world. These are entities with vast powers and resources, and the risk to Microsoft is potentially billions of dollars, if not its very existence.
Sure, I understand that it can happen... but at the end of the day who is the one still standing. Microsoft gets fined, the investors who stuck through the bankruptcy get paid... but the competitor is DEAD.
Is it more expensive then buying a company... most likely, but it stops the entire market space moving forward. Microsoft knew they were violating anti-trust with the browser but they still did it. In doing so they delayed any move towards the "Networked computer" model that everyone was saying was the future.
To protect the crown jewels (windows + office) I am pretty sure Microsoft will sacrifice it all to maintain that monopoly. Like Nero in Rome, they will let it burn.
I'm curious, why don't they just provide Windows Server 2008 R2? With the Desktop Experience installed, it's functionally identical to Windows 7, and you can license an unlimited copies on Windows Server Datacenter Edition, which is $3,000 per CPU.
I have a hosted WS2008R2 instance that I can RDP into and use for whatever I want. Are there some other licensing constraints that prevent WS2008 from being used in that manner?
This is definitely an interesting space. I keep a Parallels Windows 7 VM on my machine, and I use it for the amazing features in the Windows version of Microsoft Office (former MS Office UI PM here). If I could replace that with an always up-to-date cloud-based copy (I'm always installing security patches since I rarely boot it) I'd do so in a heartbeat.
Not really. The amount of time and money for DOJ to prosecute microsoft the first time was huge, and there are competing virtual desktops, so good luck getting them on this point.
Antitrust cases against big companies are always going to be expensive, but one of the many stupid things the DOJ and states did in the Microsoft case was making Microsoft fight for its life. It was unnecessarily aggressive and drove up the expense.
And, there were competing browsers and operating systems during the first case, too. The mere existence of competitors does not preclude antitrust action. Just ask AT&T and T-Mobile.
> The mere existence of competitors does not preclude antitrust action.
Agreed. I just don't see the anti-competitive behavior around virtual desktops that we did with WinOS and IE, so I think it would be a very tough sell.
What are the reasons to favor one specific vendor giving it a key advantage over the other? Microsoft seems to be clearly playing favorites here. What are they trying to do? Give a monopoly to their favorite vendor? Is it legal to use your monopoly to expand someone else's? Can we really call this company, with its seemingly deep and strong ties to Microsoft, a separate entity? If it's not, this is clearly something the DoJ should look into.
If I provide a virtualized hardware desktop hosting platform that can enable the client to load an ISO of Windows and enter his own serial key, am I violating any Windows hosted desktop restrictions?
Or am I only violating it if I supply the serial keys (from legit separate/per-customer/never re-asigned OEM copies)?
I think it's the latter, because in the former there is absolutly no contract between myself and Microsoft. What the client does with my platform is his business and doing. If he activates Windows there, that's between him and Microsoft.
So what is the problem that these articles are trying to point out? How is it difficult for customers to buy their own OEM copy and supply a serial key?...
Cusomter goes to your panel, clicks to load some already predefined or prehosted VHD or ISO, then supplies serial key him/herself. Problem solved? Or is this all about the cost of OEM copies?
From the article: "We do know from Microsoft's blog post that vendors can only host Windows 7 desktops in a virtual desktop infrastructure setting if the customers buy their own licenses from Microsoft. Even if this requirement is met, the vendor must host the desktops on separate physical hardware for each customer, ruling out a multitenant arrangement."
You might be able to enable the client to load an ISO of Windows and have him enter his serial key but you'd have to separate hardware for each customer making any virtualization completely pointless.
These services are not VPSs. They're basically selling RDP access to pre-installed copies of Windows, where the service provider handles all the licensing and serial keys. The idea is to target non-technical users who want to run MS Office or Flash websites on their iPad without paying for a PC running Windows.
I don't think Microsoft is playing favorites with OnLive; rather, they are trying to save their hardware "partners" from certain doom since they do not have any such offerings. This would indirectly impact Microsoft itself since OEM licensing makes Microsoft a lot of money.
A similar situation exists with video games. The market is going pure digital and gamers want the ability to sell "used" digital games. If that were possible then a middleman service would appear which would instantly "buy" and "sell" the game as you launched and closed a game. A wildly successful game such as Skyrim sells millions of copies but only had ~300,000k concurrent users (on PC) at launch. A couple of months later and that number is only ~50,000. Suffice to say this will never be allowed to happen.