Microsoft and Softricity: Licensing

A lot of comment on Microsoft’s intention to buy Softricity (Steve Richards, Brian Madden, others)

My own viewpoint can be summarised like this:

• Technology: Great
• User Experience: Great
• Licensing: Problem

Both Steve and Brian touch on the licensing issue. The benchmark that everyone in the market works to when it comes to licensing is Microsoft. Whatever Microsoft are doing everyone else falls into line with. The Microsoft licensing engine is dominated by licensing that is installation based. In other words, you pay for every installation.

In order to accommodate the ‘terminal server’ type applications the pay-per-installation scenario has been fudged a bit to state that a license is required for each device capable of running the application on the terminal server.

Application virtualisation only becomes truly valuable where the licensing terms are flexible and fluid allowing a pay-per-use type model.

The pressure is on to make this change, but until Microsoft makes a dramatic change no-one else will see the need to. Moving to a pay-per-use model would require a huge shift for Microsoft and significantly impact the revenue from enterprise licensing and from Office; both of them things that they will be unwilling to tinker with too much.

Without a shift in licensing mechanisms application virtualisation is stick.

Tags: Microsoft, Softricity, Licensing