The maze of Microsoft licensing
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008I don’t know why Microsoft’s licensing and pricing for software is so convoluted and murky. For reasons known only somewhere in Redmond, Microsoft seems to go out of its way to make its licensing practices as hard to understand as possible. A skeptic might say that the company hopes that confusion will make consumers pay more than they might have to if they actually understood the Microsoft policies. It’s almost as if Microsoft sees pricing as a game where they try to make you guess what you might have to pay for Windows. Even Ed Bott, who has close ties to Microsoft, has been moved to comment:
Trying to find the best price for Microsoft software is a frustrating game, with a constantly shifting set of rules that leave most people feeling like losers. Trying to understand whether you’re staying within those rules is stressful. I don’t know a single person who thinks the retail price of Windows is fair and that the terms of use are understandable. In fact, the entire licensing structure for Windows feels Byzantine and outmoded.