4 ms·

Enterprise. Never forget enterprise. Microsoft makes money through their enterprise lines that Apple and Google wish they could get their hands on.

eitally 12y ago
We pay MS $3-5m/yr for desktop & server licenses to support a company wtih about 25,000 users/PCs. Their licensing model is extremely convoluted, and near impossible for a single person to fully understand. All the VARs have their own teams to work with enterprises on MS licensing & true-ups, and of course MS have their own org to help, too. It's not just counting usage, either, because so many products can be licensed in so many different ways. For example, you can license Windows desktop OS by named user or by machine. If you do it by machine, it's cheaper, but if you do it by named user then that user can utilize the license on up to 5 (I think) devices (PCs, tablets, phones, whatever). Generally speaking, licenses by machine are called CALs (client access licenses), and the way you get to a number is by running a report in Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager (MS SCCM), which is a server platform that helps you manage and distribute software to machines attached to your Active Directory domain(s). However, there is another option for desktop licensing: desktop virtualization using Microsoft Remote Desktop running on a server or VM. In this case, you have to pay for RDP CALs, which cost about 3x what a desktop "Core" CAL does. If you're running Terminal Server (for the RDP clients to access), you have to license that (the server OS + Terminal Server itself) ... however, you can reduce the Server OS license by also licensing Windows Server Datacenter Edition, which lets you pay once per Virtual Host and lets you spin up as many Windows Server VMs on that host as you want. Anyway, counting all this and figuring out the contract amount is done using these SCCM reports, plus a bunch of manually counted stuff plugged into a complicated Excel workbook with many tabs, formulae and hidden VBA ... and then you start the person-to-person negotiations with Microsoft, because depending whether you're a category A, B, or C enterprise you get different pricing, and you can be in different categories for different products or product lines. I'd say that each time we have to do a true-up it consumes about 1000 person hours.
- kchoudhu 12y ago
  m = 1000, or m = 1000000? (Sorry, my definition of those suffixes has been forever muddled by working in finance :( )
  - jayrox 12y ago
    1,000,000
  - hobarrera 12y ago
    I'm guessing he meant "M". "k" is usually described to count thousands. [1] I'm curious, in what country do you live that finance uses different prefixes? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#Prefixes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#...
    - kchoudhu 12y ago
      The US -- have worked at a couple of banks so far, and M for thousand and MM for million have been constants.
tdicola 12y ago
The iPhone alone is making more in a quarter than Microsoft makes in an entire year. I'm pretty sure Apple couldn't care less about Microsoft right now.
vinceguidry 12y ago
Let's not overstate things. Apple is roughly twice as large as Microsoft as far as the numbers go, with 30K fewer employees. Jobs' decision to own the entire tech stack paid off for them handsomely.
- jeswin 12y ago
  >Jobs' decision to own the entire tech stack paid off for them handsomely. Sure. But to be fair, Microsoft's four decades of returning non stop profits is more remarkable than Apple's relatively recent success and it's chequered record overall. No technology company is likely to wield the kind of power that Microsoft had in the 90's. So the advantage in doing software or the entire stack is very time period sensitive.

eitally 12y ago

We pay MS $3-5m/yr for desktop & server licenses to support a company wtih about 25,000 users/PCs. Their licensing model is extremely convoluted, and near impossible for a single person to fully understand. All the VARs have their own teams to work with enterprises on MS licensing & true-ups, and of course MS have their own org to help, too. It's not just counting usage, either, because so many products can be licensed in so many different ways. For example, you can license Windows desktop OS by named user or by machine. If you do it by machine, it's cheaper, but if you do it by named user then that user can utilize the license on up to 5 (I think) devices (PCs, tablets, phones, whatever). Generally speaking, licenses by machine are called CALs (client access licenses), and the way you get to a number is by running a report in Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager (MS SCCM), which is a server platform that helps you manage and distribute software to machines attached to your Active Directory domain(s). However, there is another option for desktop licensing: desktop virtualization using Microsoft Remote Desktop running on a server or VM. In this case, you have to pay for RDP CALs, which cost about 3x what a desktop "Core" CAL does. If you're running Terminal Server (for the RDP clients to access), you have to license that (the server OS + Terminal Server itself) ... however, you can reduce the Server OS license by also licensing Windows Server Datacenter Edition, which lets you pay once per Virtual Host and lets you spin up as many Windows Server VMs on that host as you want. Anyway, counting all this and figuring out the contract amount is done using these SCCM reports, plus a bunch of manually counted stuff plugged into a complicated Excel workbook with many tabs, formulae and hidden VBA ... and then you start the person-to-person negotiations with Microsoft, because depending whether you're a category A, B, or C enterprise you get different pricing, and you can be in different categories for different products or product lines. I'd say that each time we have to do a true-up it consumes about 1000 person hours.

kchoudhu 12y ago
m = 1000, or m = 1000000? (Sorry, my definition of those suffixes has been forever muddled by working in finance :( )
- jayrox 12y ago
  1,000,000
- hobarrera 12y ago
  I'm guessing he meant "M". "k" is usually described to count thousands. [1] I'm curious, in what country do you live that finance uses different prefixes? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#Prefixes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#...
  - kchoudhu 12y ago
    The US -- have worked at a couple of banks so far, and M for thousand and MM for million have been constants.

tdicola 12y ago

The iPhone alone is making more in a quarter than Microsoft makes in an entire year. I'm pretty sure Apple couldn't care less about Microsoft right now.

vinceguidry 12y ago

Let's not overstate things. Apple is roughly twice as large as Microsoft as far as the numbers go, with 30K fewer employees. Jobs' decision to own the entire tech stack paid off for them handsomely.

jeswin 12y ago
>Jobs' decision to own the entire tech stack paid off for them handsomely. Sure. But to be fair, Microsoft's four decades of returning non stop profits is more remarkable than Apple's relatively recent success and it's chequered record overall. No technology company is likely to wield the kind of power that Microsoft had in the 90's. So the advantage in doing software or the entire stack is very time period sensitive.