McKown, John pisze:
I was told that today's obscene software prices goes back to the consolidation timeframe. Many shops were around back then and each paying a separate license fee. Then, huge "service bureaus" opened up and many shops consolidate to few. And the few then "multiplexed" their software licenses to all their clients. And the software vendors were badly hurt. So they invented the "pay per MIP" charging.
1. MIPS, not MIP. MIPS is singular, not plural.
Both are meaningless ;-))) but in different meaning.
2. I don't think that price per MIPS came from service bureaus. IMHO it
was the method to charge "as much as you can pay". Avg price per shop
would be to much for small shops and to little (money) for large ones.
BTW: similar pricing models can be observed in other businesses,
examples: tire change in Jeep costs more than in van or truck (here, in
Lodz). Cabel TV connection fee depends on your house "size" the larger
the more expensive. No relationship to real costs.
Imagine what MS would __like__ to do (if possible) if Intel came out with a 128 core processor and data centers
collapsed all their servers on a 100:1 ratio? And wanted to do the same with their MS software licenses. Oh, and in
addition decided to use Linux desktop which would "remote desktop" into a "terminal server"
arrangement (so the users would still be running their normal Windows applications) so that MS got 1 server license
instead of 100 desktop licenses. All of a sudden, MS would demand "pay per MIP" as well! Come to think of it,
I think MS uses "pay per seat" for this arrangement just to make it undesirable.
Impossible. In most cases M$ servers run underutilized, but
consolidation is not done because of (real or assumed) troubles with
putting many apps on one server (*). That's why people use crowd of
blade servers, usually small to average in terms of CPU power.
BTW: M$ and other comapnies on this platform also uses "pay as much as
you can" model. Price can be related to DB size, number of cores, number
of servers, etc. etc. They don't use MIPS or MSU, WLC, but that's
related to technical issues.
(*) Nowadays it's popular to perform consolidation based on VMWare - a
kind of VM for PC. Applications (OSes) are still on different virtual
machines, but they share (fewer number) of real PC servers.
--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland
--
BRE Bank SA
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