Ballmer Picks on Competitors Over.. Cost?
by Wyatt WalterMicrosoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently talked about Microsoft’s virtualization strategy for the next few years. In the video interview on ZDnet, Ballmer talks about democratizing virtualization.
He says that currently only 5% of servers are virtualized, and Microsoft has the key to making it more like 80%. Of course he took a shot at VMware, saying:
“If you want virtualization on 80 percent of servers instead of 5 percent of servers, you better not charge three times as much as the price of the server for the virtualization!”
Wait. What just happened here? I had to watch the video twice before I believed it. The CEO of Microsoft is going to give a lecture on over-priced software licenses? I almost fell off my chair when I heard him say that. Wow, I completely didn’t expect that. I expected some statement about how their software is better or something like that, but not that they were cheaper. Two things
1. Is Microsoft really going to bring up licensing costs as an argument for using their platform? Let’s say, for instance, that I want to upgrade my existing desktop from XP with Office 2003 to Vista Ultimate with Office 2007 Pro. Hardware upgrade costs aside, I can buy a Windows Vista Ultimate upgrade for $184.99 from Newegg. Then, I need to buy the Office 2007 upgrade. A professional version upgrade will cost me $289.99 on Newegg. That’s a total of $474.98. Now, let’s say I want to buy myself the upgrades for my Mac. I can spend $109.95 on the Leopard license from Newegg and iWork ‘08 for $68.99. Yes, we can clearly see that Microsoft is definitely in a position to brag about licensing costs. Anyway, that’s another argument for another day.
2. Is it really free? According to the documentation, in order for the clustering to work you have to use Windows Server Enterprise or Datacenter edition on the bare metal. Well, being the curious soul that I am, I decided to find the cost. You can buy an OEM copy of Enterprise edition (the cheaper version) for the low cost of $2,699.99 from Newegg. Now we’re over halfway to the cost of ESX server and with ESX you don’t have the performance and management cost of running a full-blow Windows OS underneath everything else. Plus, I can’t live-migrate my virtual machines across physical machines like Xen or VMware. I’m going to leave alone the fact that you can’t access the hypervisor features using “unsupported” OS’s, like you know.. not Windows or SUSE Linux.
In true Microsoft style, they are late to the game and feature-poor, yet they try to push their weight around and make ridiculous claims. I didn’t start this blog to become a Microsoft-basher, but they make it so difficult not to. Sadly, I’m projecting that Hyper-V will become fairly popular simply because it comes bundled within the Windows server OS, just like Internet Explorer is one of the dominating browsers simply out of convenience.
Tags: hyper-v, microsoft, virtualization, vmware, xen
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Comments (2) :
Sep 27th, 2008
September 29th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
[...] another part of the recent the Churchill Club event I talked about a few days ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked for a bit on mobile phones and hinted at Microsoft’s [...]
November 17th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
[...] is great but so far their licensing hasn’t adjusted to the way the market is moving. Even Steve Ballmer harped on VMware for its pricing model. Of course, they do offer the ESXi version of their software [...]