Jeff’s having a good discussion over at A BizTalk Enthusiast : Transition from MSDN Universal to Visual Studio Team Edition about the new Team System Pricing.
I know, it’s a dead horse, along with DataSets versus BEs, VB.NET vs
C#, and all the other *blog post topics that tend to crop up every
month or two . Remember, I’m an open source hippie,
and pretty liberal to boot. I was raised that way, so it’s not
really my fault, but it’s how I tend to think. So,
here’s my take on MS charging lots and lots (enterprise prices) for
Team System:
Ballmer said "Developers, Developers, Developers" right?
Now, if you’re like me, you heard this and thought of armies
of developers, writing good code, saving the world – one unit
test at a time. Some of us may
have linked this sentiment to our own drive
to create quality software systems that work, in some
kind of “greater good” of software development way. But we were
really just kidding ourselves. The real meaning of
this statement was “… they’re they key to our success…” ie
“…they’re the key to shareholder profit…” We all really
understood (even us hippies) that this statement really meant:
“Developers, Developers, Developers : this is how Microsoft will stay uber-profitable and continue to crush our enemies.”
Which is fine. No problem here with companies making money… Hey, even hippies have to retire and own boats.
But here’s where I’m a little confused.
If Ballmer really sees us developers as the key to MS making
money, why would they price Team System out of
reach - and even un-license us MSDN subscribers from using
parts of it? Especially since we’re writing .NET code with the
stuff. It’s not like Java shops are going to be buying Team
System and using it to manage the process of writing Linux code, are
they? Wasn’t he saying that MS needs to enable developers? Isn’t this what you were saying Steve?
Perhaps what Ballmer really meant is “Developers, Developers, Developers – We're not charging you guys enough!"
Every day, I'm more and more interested in open source.
I often wonder if I could do what I need to do without any MS
software installed on my home computers. Don’t get me
wrong – I love Microsoft. I’ve lost friendshps over my love for
them. I just don’t love giving them too much of my
money. Hey, I’m already devoting my career to their
technology, what more do they need from me? Revenue from the four
computers I have sitting in my house?
Finally, a shameless self-serving announcement
I really like Telligent's open source model. Information Week has
a cover story on Open Source this week. They’ve called it a
“Boomlet.” I think they’re right. I’ve decided to release WSMQ
as an open source application, with a licensing structure similar to
Telligent’s. I’ll be posting more about that in the next few
weeks.
-Brendan
* This BTW could be the fatal flaw with blogs and is
a topic for another post “Cyclic Redundancy Patterns in Blog Post
Topics” (the other fatal flaw is that people like me can comment on
issues like this, and get a Google ranking companies would kill for ..
is this really a good thing?).