Posted on 04/21/2008 10:17:34 AM PDT by kiriath_jearim
Novell Inc. and Microsoft Corp., trying to expand the reach of their unusual alliance, say they plan to put a bigger emphasis on the Chinese market.
The companies say they will make an extra investment to sell more support subscriptions for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system in China. The idea is to court companies currently using Linux without any software support, often for free.
China is "quite a large and growing market in terms of Linux," said Susan Heystee, Novell's vice president and general manager of global strategic alliances. There is "a very large nonpaid Linux market" in China, she said, but many of those companies are now looking for support for mission-critical systems and for virtualization, setups where multiple operating systems can run on one piece of hardware.
Under their partnership, announced in November 2006, Microsoft agreed to buy and redistribute $240 million worth of SUSE Linux support certificates. The alliance was seen as unusual because Linux has long been one of the biggest competitive threats to Microsoft Windows.
As part of the 2006 deal, the companies agreed not to pursue claims against each other's users for patent infringement.
That provision has stirred controversy in the open-source software community by appearing to lend support to Microsoft's separate claims that Linux violates its patented technology. Novell has publicly disputed those claims.
As part of the announcement Sunday, the companies said People's Insurance Co. of China, Dawning Information Industry Co. and The Dairy Farm Co. will receive certificates from Microsoft for three years of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server support from Novell.
The companies declined to say how much more they will be investing as part of the partnership's bigger focus on China.
ping...
SUSE LES is really good stuff. And the Desktop product with Open Office et al easily substitutes for any Windoze unit. Both are cheaper than MS, and you don’t have every Juan, Ricardo and Achmed writing virus programs to attack you.
90% of the people where I work would do just fine with OpenOffice and probably wouldn't know the difference.
I keep my live CD's on hand for eliminating hardware problems which get blamed somewhat when it is Chairman Bill's OS causing the problem.
Well...I suppose the good news is that once you have a billion Chinese using Linux then we will finally get enough support for US-based PC users to dump Windoze.
I'm a strong advocate of using what works best for you.
In most cases the "exorbitant" amount of dollars paid for using Microsoft's products can be made back in a very short period of time if it saves workers time in using or configuring the software.
A $100 for an OS license, or $250 for an Office license isn't that much when considering American labor rates for those using the software. If Linux fits the need, it's a better choice, because it's free. If another product fits the need even slightly better, it doesn't take a lot for it to pay for itself.
In China, labor is far cheaper, so free software that in some situations take more time to support or use, makes much more sense.
Since China is a communist country, and many of the companies are government owned, there is also a greater incentive to keep more people employed even if it ends up being more costly or less efficient.
I actually agree with you somewhat.
It’s not the $250 that I think about. It’s the $250 times 10000 employees, but I’m sure by now MS has some kind of ooh ahh discount to entice that kind of program. And I know it’s just a matter of “well the software came out of the box with the machine when we bought it.”
Microsoft has been very good at playing the fair market value over the years. I don’t hear too many people complaining about them, except for the minority, which are comprised of the geeky types. -> me, and I have always qualified that with - “I really don’t care what OS I use.”
The average Joe seems to be very satisfied with MS.
But like you and the article appear to say, maybe this is not a model that is working for the Chinese market and Microsoft will be able to turn a profit with the help of Novell.
Sometimes I wonder how much is real and how much is percieved cost savings.
If someone has a problem that literally takes about 5 minutes to fix - maybe the Chinese are being rewared when they figure it out for themselves.
I believe Red Flag Linux is the ‘official’ Linux variant for most government related system in the PRC.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Ah, but Linux Vista is just around the corner! ;)
When you're talking about companies with 10,000 employees, they usually are par of one of Microsoft's Enterprise Licensing Programs. They don't buy computers loaded with all the software. They buy seats for the software they want, and then they can load it on that many people's computers, and usually those people's laptops or home computers as well.
They do it that way partially because of the discounts they get on buying in mass quantities, and partially because it saves them from having to track licenses for all that software and make sure they have legal copies. If they have a legal seat for each of their employees, they don't have to worry about one of their employees having illegally loaded software on one of their computers. Since maintaining records and keeping track of what is supposed to be on which computers is time consuming and expensive, it can be cheaper to buy more licenses than they really need if most employees do need it.
Microsoft has been very good at playing the fair market value over the years. I don’t hear too many people complaining about them, except for the minority, which are comprised of the geeky types. -> me, and I have always qualified that with - “I really don’t care what OS I use.”
In my case my desktop PC is pretty much required to be a Windows box, but depending on what project I'm working on I might be using Windows, Linux, Solaris, or one of several embedded OSs.
I'll work with whatever works best for the application, or whatever the customer wants (which may have nothing to do with whatever works best).
The average Joe seems to be very satisfied with MS.
Windows XP is really a pretty good OS for the average Joe.
I tried using Ubuntu at home for a while, and it ran very well on an older PC, and what it did well, it did very well, though some thinks took more tinkering than I would have liked to get working.
I also ran into some things that I either couldn't do, or weren't worth the effort doing on Ubuntu, so I needed to keep an XP box around. Some of the things were as simple as not being able to view web pages that some idiot had developed so that they only displayed properly under Internet explorer. I also seemed to have more difficulty getting multimedia applications configured and working well under Ubuntu.
To sum it up. I could do without Ubuntu, but I couldn't do without XP. When I got sick of tinkering with both, my Ubuntu box just started sitting there unused.
But like you and the article appear to say, maybe this is not a model that is working for the Chinese market and Microsoft will be able to turn a profit with the help of Novell.
It's more of a matter of market share. In the US, the market for Linux is small enough where Microsoft can afford to give up much of that market to others while hanging onto more profitable market segments.
In China, the share of the market where their US business model works is a small part of the whole, and there is a lot of money to be make by charging a small amount for support to a huge number of customers.
Microsoft can be a bit arrogant, but they aren't entirely stupid.
As does everyone else. However, Microsoft's other advantage is that change is usually difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Even if you can argue that the cost saving are questionable, it's hard to argue against the expense and lost productivity from retraining your employees and support staff.
However, in China, Microsoft has the opposite problem. There people are used to Linux, so Microsoft has to not only provide cost savings, but they have to provide enough savings to justify changing over to Microsoft products. That's an awfully hard argument to make.
If you have to go back and forth between *nix and Win very much you might what to take a look at Windows Powershell if you haven't yet.
The latest release, 8.04, a Long Term Release, arrives Thursday. You might want to take a drive through it and see if your difficulties are still present.
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