BACK in the days, more than half a decade ago, we wrote a great deal about Microsoft, after we had focused on Novell. Microsoft was a big threat to software freedom. It still is, but there are now other threats, some of which more potent than others. Microsoft is now buying back its own shares to artificially elevate the share/stock price (fewer stocks available for the public to buy means higher price per share). Microsoft also lays off a lot of employees and moves into small offices. We know this based on insiders. There's a serious cost-cutting process inside Microsoft. Some people may then say, Microsoft is now a "cloud" company (or "cloud first"). These are just marketing-oriented buzzwords for servers/hosting. Microsoft servers are going down [1] and Microsoft is jacking up the price of servers with Windows on them, according to Microsoft Peter [2]. It's a poor strategy which will most likely drive away customers even more quickly (quicker migration) to GNU/Linux, in the form of AWS, Red Hat, IBM, Rackspace and so on.
"Focusing on issues rather than brands ensures we will stay on target all along, even when companies like Novell die."Vista 10, the common carrier, is reportedly a massive failure (growth already flattens) despite Microsoft's many dirty tricks, which included force-feeding Vista 10 (to further be escalated next year). The trends matter, not the absolute numbers, as media reports typically cite Microsoft-linked firms’ figures (like Net Applications), not legitimate or independent figures. The fact remains though, not only on the server but on the desktop too (not to mention mobile) Microsoft is struggling. We are therefore not as interested as before in Microsoft's business. We shall focus more on patents in the coming months or years. Focusing on issues rather than brands ensures we will stay on target all along, even when companies like Novell die. ⬆
Related/contextual items from the news:
MICROSOFT HAS CONFIRMED that Office 365 is back up and running after suffering downtime across Europe on Thursday.
The downtime left users, including us here at The INQUIRER, unable to access their Exchange email account via a web browser.
At the time, Down Detector showed that Microsoft's cloud service has been stuttering since 9.17am on Thursday, and confirmed that the outage is affecting users across Europe.
Windows Server 2016, not likely to arrive until the second half of next year, is going to shake up the way Microsoft licenses its server operating system, moving away from per socket licensing to per core. The change was first spotted by Wes Miller who is, for his sins, an expert on Microsoft licensing policies.
Windows Server 2012 introduced a great rationalization in the way Microsoft licensed its server operating system. The two main editions, Standard and Datacenter, had identical features, and differed only in terms of the number of virtual operating system instances they supported. Standard supported two VMs (in addition to the host OS); Datacenter was unlimited. Beyond that, they were identical. The licenses for both editions were sold in two socket units; one license was needed for each pair of sockets a system contained.