OS X also only comes in awesome.

This is where MS's initial idea for Vista's segmentation would have worked. Since standard server limits memory, they could sell you the "Memory Optimized Addressing" or some other similarly-named version, and just buying via the OS would let it work. Its damning for servers since (a) licenses are so expensive and (b) reinstalling an OS can be a very labor-intensive process, especially since you should be running the software through the testing wringer now that its on a "different" OS.

I ran into a similar problem recently when I upgraded my old(ish) T60 to 4gb of ram. Turns out that Lenovo is a bunch of weasels and decided to put an artificial cap on the maximum ram at 3gb. This doesn't seem to be due to market segmentation, merely laziness, Lenovo tries to blame the chipset but that chipset supports 4gb and the processor (core2 duo) is x64 so there's no good reason for Lenovo to have done such a thing other than as an engineering shortcut.

While I agree with your overall arugment and position, your comparison with 37signals falls flat, because they are actually allocating more or less hardware, depending on the plan you choose. It's not a completely arbitrary decision on their part.

For hardware limitations imposed by packaged software, you're spot on.

hilariously great! today I must say you were the venus williams of the blog writers. witty, powerful and with style :D

A nice theory, but not quite true. Open-source software comes in many editions. Even Free Software comes in many editions, if you want to get into that nomenclature debate.

For example, the company I work for has a product that's based around a set of GPL-licensed programs. You can download the sources from the FSF and some other places, and build it yourself, to make it do whatever you want. Or we offer three other versions. You can download a copy from us, for free, that's not got some of the spiffy tools but works fine. You can pay us a little bit, and get a pre-compiled version that has a shiny GUI and does a single-click install on Windows or Linux. Or you can pay us a lot, and get a no-limit support contract that goes with it, and bug-fix updates whenever you need them.

I don't know that this really affects your point that much, except to say that, in our domain, quite a lot of our users find that trying to do the compile-it-yourself version really takes rather more of their brains than downloading something that just works.

Jeff, I gotta wonder ... you based your entire business on a technology stack produced by the most weasely company existence, and you're only now realizing it? It's hard to understand how you weren't aware of that to start.

The real answer to your quandary is to not decide between footloose and greasy bacony goodnes (as both are great), but rather to decide NOT to use Microsoft products in the first place. I know you've got a lot invested in the MS stack, but the sooner you cut your addiction to them and switch to a perpetually awesome stack, the happier (long term) you're going to be.

I looked up the prices. Ouch! $2,200 just to flip the bit that says 'yes, you can use 48GB of memory'? I'd seriously think about just buying another server with 32GB...

I am reminded of the "Microsoft iPod Human Ear Edition with Subscription Upgrade" that circled the tubes a few years ago. Or, I remember you did a similar rant regarding SmartFTP Standard or Professional editions, and I ended up doing the same thing: bought standard, then I needed SFTP one day, and had to "upgrade" (pay more money) to retrieve my secret Konami code to enable SFTP.

In software, this kind of market segmentation just feels a little more sinister, I imagine because there's no physical product involved. (Meanwhile, in Home Depot, I can choose from among three different Toro leaf blowers, but that's not so bad because they're three different physical units, even if they probably are sharing 90% of their parts in common.)

Yes, Microsoft's greatest fault is its marketing department. I mean, ".NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 are just DLLs on top of the 2.0 with some service packs, but .NET 4.0, now that's a biggie, hoo boy" pretty much sums up the latest idiocy. Or remember when they kept slapping .NET onto the end of everything? Passport.NET, Windows Server.NET....

The thing that cracks me up the most is that almost all of the pages have to have a "How to Buy" button because, well, it can be difficult figuring that out. Do I hunt down a sketchball vendor online? Do I really have to go through one of these idiot small business specialists? Do I need to spend three days researching what the heck Open Licensing is and how to get into it?

Some days I just want to pack it all up and move to the mountains.

@Jeremy: If Jeff is referring to the SO/SF/SU server(s), then switching away from MS would be prohibitive -- it would need to be a total rewrite in a new language. It would be cheaper to just keep paying the $2,200+ for getting the "necessary" (necessary only since MS says so) server license instead of rewriting.

Grocery store coupons do the exact same thing. For people who's time is less valuable, a.k.a. unemployed members of a household, it's worth it to clip coupons. For wealthier, busier people, it's not worth the time and effort to save a few dollars.

You are so dead-on about this segmentation of a product for B.S. reasons. It's so frustrating trying to figure out which version of Vista, Office, or Visual Studio to use.

I don't, however, share your enthusiasm for OSS. In a perfect world, all OSS would indeed be awesome, but I've dealt with quite a bit of OSS projects I would describe using another word that starts with aw: AWFUL!

Yeah, the price is free, but to me, my time is more important than anything else and I wasted way too much of it trying to get some OSS to work.

While I agree with your distaste for the marketing game, it seems like a stretch to apply this to OSS.

BTW: Kevin Bacon was in Footloose, so either edition will work for that purpose! ;-)

So basically you blame Microsoft for making the charts too complex.
I agree -- marketing department at Microsoft is good in milking customers but bad in customer satisfaction.
If MS marketing department made product comparison charts more user friendly, then marketers still could get all the money but customers wouldn't be frustrated as you are now.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/compare-specs.aspx

Looks like you need/want Enterprise

Jeremy: "I know you've got a lot invested in the MS stack, but the sooner you cut your addiction to them and switch to a perpetually awesome stack, the happier (long term) you're going to be."

Yup, what any successful solution needs is a complete rewrite and redesign on a different platform that is potentially superior in some way.

>> Bacon is delicious, but I also love that Footloose song..

If you love Bacon and Footloose then you need

Windows 7 Kevin Bacon Edition

Nick

@ascagnel
True, it's cheaper if you're JUST looking at the cost of the Winblows license for this one machine. But just an OS does not a web stack make, and one machine does not a (large) site make.

My point was that both the financial cost and the heartache of using the MS stack is only going to grow and grow over time. The sooner he bites the bullet and re-jiggers his code (.NET stuff is significantly different from other platforms, but switching wouldn't have to require a TOTAL rewrite), the sooner he can start realizing the true value of an open source stack.

(... And thus the sooner he can hit the "break even" point where the savings he gets from OSS finally eclipses the cost/withdrawl symptoms he had to pay to cut his addiction to MS.)

As someone said above, there is a huge difference between tiered pricing for hosting and for your server. In the case of hosting, you are receiving actual value for your money. You pay more money; you get more resources. With MS, you are actually paying for less work with more money. Think about it. MS builds an OS, and then they actually put more work in to limit what it can do. It's not "smart pricing." It's just a rip off.

i think you're spot on with the knock on ms, but comparing to 37signals and other web-based apps is not fair, imho. the reason you get charged more for a premium basecamp account, is that you are then able to use more resources, which the vendor has to pay for. so you can choose a size that fits you, and pay for what you use. this is the good kind of segmentation.

the weaselly kind is when microsoft artificially and arbitrarily limits a software product, in order to sell an un-hobbled version for more money. did it cost them more to make the premium version? no. will they incur more overhead by selling you a premium version? no. so the distinction is only one of their own making. this is the evil part. in fact, it conceivably cost them *more* to make and offer these other versions. there's engineering time, design and marketing time, etc.

so by all means, give em hell, but don't confuse this with meaningful and good product segmentation. expecting all web-based app accounts to cost the same is akin to thinking all cars should cost the same. you're paying more because you're getting more. and if you want a cheap option, it's there.

I think there's a fundamental difference in charging more for a hosting plan and charging more for Windows: giving you more disk space or bandwidth costs the hosting company more, but Enterprise edition doesn't cost Microsoft any more than Standard does.

On the other hand, I'm sure they would argue that they couldn't support Windows development on just those who only need the least capable systems, and there aren't enough people willing to pony up for just Enterprise, so really, we're *forcing* them to do this.

@Bjørn
I assume you're being sarcastic :-) If it was just this one issue of Windows licensing I would agree, but just look at (for instance) this other recent post:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001279.html

The Microsoft "tax" isn't just affecting the one server that is the highlight of this blog post. And as anyone who has used an MS stack and then ... well, not used an MS stack can tell you, the tax doesn't just stop with OS licenses either. So no, switching your entire infrastructure JUST so that you can use all your RAM on one machine is not a good idea. But switching your entire infrastructure while you're still relatively small compared to what you hope to someday become, so that you can suffer less now than if you switched later, does (or at least can) make sense. Especially when you stand to gain so much in the long term by doing so.

My first thought about your previous post about adding more RAM was, "I wonder, if he remembered to get the corrected edition with that much RAM". I would/should have set off alarm bells in any Windows admin's head. This is test 1, chapter 1, in the study materials for MSCE type certs.

Use linux ;)

Yeah, remember, FOSS is only free if your time isn't worth anything.

Not exactly 100% true, but labour costs and the time costs do need to be taken into account when you're looking at these things.

And I say this as someone who purchases software from Oracle. If you've ever bought anything from Oracle, you'll know that they make Microsoft look like the salvation army. But if I were to try to do the things here with cheaper products, we'd end up spending a lot more in the end.

If you are paying full price for any Server license from MS, you are paying too much or your MS rep is a moron.

This is purely anecdotal but it is what I have been told by my local MS evangelists.

NOTE: the Captcha on this site is awesome... I had to click refresh a bunch of times before I got one I could read...

Brilliant insight -- now I know why developers tell marketing people not to comment on code. That is, assuming that the insights of marketing people on code are on par with Jeff's diatribe on the evils of marketing.

Without a doubt marketing people are prone to over segmenting markets, and this tendency grows exponentially with the amount of profit to be gained by said over-segmentation. A good thing developers never overcomplicate things and make them seem more complicated than they actually are. Never seen a developer give a business person a bulls**t estimate of level of effort on a task to either buy time, or get out of doing a boring task. Never.

People have jobs. They do them and sometimes doing them well means customers pay money. If you buy that server upgrade you've just proven that the MSFT marketing people are doing their job well.

Thanks for doing a good job on SO -- I'll keep buying it.

Joel tought us a nice lesson about consumer surplus and software pricing, you might want to take a look at it:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html
(that was back when he bothered to write nice essays :-))

It has been very handy to me trying to explain my bosses why we should use different pricing schemes, while trying to keep it simple.

I would have liked to see the Zappa album cover version of "Weasels ripped my flesh"

The real question is how many lawyer-hours does it cost an enterprise to assure compliance with MS licensing terms versus OSS licensing terms.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if some simple registry settings controlled whether you could use all the installed memory or not. I've seen similar tactics from Microsoft before.

http://oreilly.com/news/differences_nt.html

P.S. I love my MS stack but sometimes things just go too far.

I think you got it all wrong - it may be just flipping a bit now but how did the support for 48 gigs get there in the first place?? By developing and testing code which all takes time and money.

Look at it this way. You develop some software, you release a single version at a single price. It works great but some big businesses need feature X. So you develop feature X - investing a wack of time and money.

Now do you roll the new feature into the single version? No - because you will have to raise the price for everyone - even people who don't want the new feature.

So you split the versions - a cheaper standard version and a more expensive "Awesome" version that has the new feature. Now everybody wins. People who don't want the new feature pay less and you get remunerated for the development work by selling the higher priced version.

Now internally the software may be the same and only a bit flip enables the new feature - but that doesn't mean that feature should be given away for free.

I want to reiterate want a bunch of others have said. You've made a false comparison in this post. Hosting has directly measurable costs that scale with the amount of data, number of users, and number of connections. The bigger your site the more electricity, disk space, processor time, even real estate your site uses. These are real world measurable things. More users using your site costs your host more money.

You using more memory in your machine does not cost Microsoft anything extra. It did cost Microsoft a lot to cripple it though. I've been part of a project that created a cripple-ware version of a product and it cost a lot of money and time to cripple it.

@Brizian:

> OS X also only comes in awesome.

...Are you serious? Quicktime won't even let you play fullscreen video unless you pay Apple an extra $30 right off the bat! Not to mention the whole let's-make-upgraders-pay-an-extra-$80-for-basic-photo-organisation-capabilities thing.

Yeah, thank God that Linux only comes in one flavor.

@Simon:

He was probably referring to OS X server, which has only one version.

I've liked the licensing where you pretty much can use unlimited, but it bugs you in certain ways all the time when you're using beyond your limit... so you put in 48 GB of RAM, it uses 48 GB but tells you that hey you're licensed for 32 GB in the event logs... and maybe displays something on startup... and maybe in the sys tray every few hour. Of course we're talking about a server here, so how often do you really access it via console/remote desktop, so this probably won't work too well on preventing users... but it's step towards "don't make me think".

Note: the system where I saw licensing implemented that way was a process data historian (kind-of like SQL Server but really quite different)... it would implement some restrictions but still could use the system. Vital to know though that the system was really costly compared to what most people think of for server software costs, but the industries that use it can afford it... it also helped that this historian seriously held a very large percentage of market share too.

This exact problem is what pushed a previous employer of mine to switch from a completely Microsoft-centric software stack to a Linux & Postgres stack a couple of years ago. My boss bought an 8-processor server from a failed .com at auction, got the thing home, and then looked up how much it would cost to install Windows and MSSQL on the thing (think per-CPU licensing costs). After his blood pressure came back down, we crunched some numbers and it turned out that it would be cheaper for me to spend the next six (or maybe it was eight) months working full-time to get our system ported over to Linux and Postgres than it would have been to buy versions of Windows and MSSQL that would actually use all eight processors. Cheaper by something like a factor of two. Now, granted, I was being underpaid at the time, but not *that* badly.

Of course, as we all know, TANSTAAFL always applies: there was pain involved in porting our system over, and we had to learn a lot about Linux in a very short period of time, and there were some gnarly integration hassles due to the rest of our company being Windows-only. I also vividly remember spending a couple of extremely unpleasant days trying to get whatever version of SuSE I was using back then to play nicely with the weird-ass SCSI RAID backplane this particular server used.

But you know what? If you were to add up the total cost of the time I spent dealing with those hassles and the pain, it still wouldn't have come close to the purchase price for eight CPUs worth of MSSQL. And, when we eventually outgrew or first server and had to set up a second instance of our system at a different location, guess what we didn't have to do? Yup, you guessed it: shell out multiple tens of thousands of dollars again in Microsoft tax. Really, it was one of the biggest no-brainers I've ever seen in person. Note that none of this has anything to do with the relative *quality* of Windows vs. Linux or MSSQL vs. Postgres- that's not a game I really want to get into. All I'm saying is that the cost difference is such (especially for smaller companies with shallow pockets) that I have a hard time seeing a reason to pay the extra money.

Two words : Ubuntu Server

I ran into a similar problem using Windows XP Standard Edition when it suddenly began rejecting additional connections into our small project team's file-server. I don't deny their right to set pricing schemes, but the problem I have coming from the Mac / Linux world is that I don't expect to be asking the right marketing-driven questions. Questions like "Does this version allow connections only limited by system resources?" or "Does this version actually address all the memory a 64-bit addressing space should allow it to address?" seem like nonsense, along the lines of asking if you want your processor to support both addition AND subtraction.

In our case, since the server was essentially operating as just a file-server, it got wiped and replaced with a Debian install, which we still use. The value-add of the MS software stack didn't make up for the (I'll go ahead and say it) psychological trauma of not being able to trust the system to conform to my arbitrary standards of functionality.

If you're looking for an FOSS altenative to Basecamp, we have a clone you can install. Check it out at our site, it's free, or find me in twitter as michokest

> First-world countries end up subsidizing the massive costs of drug development

I thought it was "Old World", "New World", "Third World"?

As a now fairly long reader I've often wondered about your Microsoft weakness. Their products don't seem particularly better than the many open source alternatives, nor do they seem easier to use. All that, plus you get the joy of jockeying with their marketing approach. I don't know. It seems a little dodgy to me. You've put your entire enterprise at the whim of a company known for making lousy decisions, for ruining industries, and for being blissfully unaware of what sorts of things would actually help their users.

Or, put another way: it's kind of liking smoking and then complaining that the tobacco companies are heartless capitalists. Uh, duh? Who is enabling them to do that?

I can understand Microsoft wanting more money for an edition with more features, but only for features that cost Microsoft to produce. To overcome the natural addressable memory limit of 4GB limit on some of their 32-bit OSes, Microsoft added software features (the PAE kernel) and reserves the right to charge more for those fetures. However, 64-bit OSes have a much higher natural addressable memory limit, so additional work isn't needed (to my knowledge anyway) for this memory to be available to applications. Therefore, in my opinion, the arbitrary 32GB limit amounts to price gouging. Charge me more for Active Directory or load balancing support, but get out of the way of my exabyte+ of memory.

Memory wants to be free!

Reminds me of the story of the business and consumer editions of an old HP Printer. They build the printer it prints so many pages a minute, thats the business version costing $$$$. They then pay engineers to design a doohicky to limit the printing speed and hey presto thats the consumer version costing $$ even though it actually cost more to produce.

Or in fact the older story of the first trams. The tram came out of the factory with a roof and nice seats they called them first class costing loads of dosh per ticket. Then they hire some guys with cutting torches to chop the roof off and rip out the nice seats these will be second class and cost not so much even though, you guessed it, the things cost more to produce...

"Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome."

I think you misspelled "time-consuming".

>> If I choose open source I don't have to think about licensing...

Ha! You have got to be kidding!!!!!! Have you ever tried to figure out if you should be paying for MySQL or not? Most people just assume that they don't have to pay for it. Some are right. A lot of them are dead wrong!

And don't even get me started on GPL, LPGL, and on and on...

You also act like the ability to support more than 32GB of RAM is the only difference between Standard and other editions of the product. Guess again!

Finally, you mean to tell me you've been in the computer business this long and don't understand that you always have to read the supported hardware configuration guides for all software? Why would you buy that much memory and not even know if your target OS can handle it?

I think the point of comparison with hosted services isn't apples for apples but it still illustrates the concept of tiered pricing being applied everywhere. CPU and video card makers do the same thing and, in that case, we actually do buy the full physical product with a core or some GPU's disabled. That would be a perfect example of a manufacturer selling the same product (albeit, altered) to different audiences at different prices.

I still can't understand how Mac-fans sit firmly in the same circle as the OSS-fans when it comes to "tax-free" products. Apple charges one fair price for the operating system and then an enormous mark-up for the hardware, which is the only hardware technically allowed to run the software. I get the Linux arguments but I'll take the "Microsoft-tax" over the, commonly overlooked "Apple-tax" any day.

This makes me wonder, how many more times you will willingly spread your buttcheeks before you consider Linux and Postgres? :-)

As others have pointed out: Microsoft developed a single version of the OS, and then purposefully crippled it. 37Signals meanwhile uses the same software, but your use uses up significant resources.

> Yeah, remember, FOSS is only free if your time isn't worth anything.

Depends upon the software: There is much of the Open Source software that is well written, well documented, and well understood. Then, there's the crap that's ...well... crap. Most of the important OSS packages are now well supported and well written. No one expects you to be a developer anymore. The old line of "If you want a feature, then why don't you program it?" is no longer true.

Training for MySql and Postgres is readily available, and there are plenty of people who are experts in both. Linux is even better in terms of technical resources.

> I think you got it all wrong - it may be just flipping a bit now but
> how did the support for 48 gigs get there in the first place?? By
> developing and testing code which all takes time and money.

> Look at it this way. You develop some software, you release a single
> version at a single price. It works great but some big businesses
> need feature X. So you develop feature X - investing a wack of time
> and money.

> Now do you roll the new feature into the single version? No -
> because you will have to raise the price for everyone - even people
> who don't want the new feature.

Except what we're talking about here isn't "more featured software is more expensive", but simple arbitrary limits. There was no extra programming involved with 32Gb vs. 48Gb limits. That's just marketing crap.

Let's take the difference between OS X for the Desktop ($129) and OS X Server Edition ($499). The Server comes with extra software to help manage your company's software setup. However, both have similar performance specs, and there's nothing in the licensing of either product that would prohibit me from using the Desktop version on my server. Yes, Server is 4x the price, but there's much more in the server.

The difference between Windows Server Standard Edition and Windows Server Datacenter Edition (besides clustering software) are some arbitrary limits, not extra programming.

All is not paradise in OpenSource land. RedHat (website down so I can't paste a link) has a few support packages available. Although not as many as Windows Editions.

This article makes me wonder: will this whole experience make you (seriously) consider an alternative to your Windows stack? Obviously, switching your O.S. *now* would be a big no-no, having all that code and those pesky clients demanding uptime, but if I were you I know I would be mad as hell with Microsoft for this. I know a lot of developers would curse at the whole Gates family tree and switch to Linux/Mac/FreeBSD/whatever, but when you invested all that time and money in your business, you take it as the ultimate insult, or as a necessary evil?

Also, to the commenters:
Windows guys: we heard the "time is wortless" argument a lot. Just drop it already, is not even *that* accurate. There are better arguments against linux than that. Seriously, is annoying.
Linux guys: "switch to linux" is not always the answer. In fact, it hurts your point. Money (or even availability of source code) is not always the top priority.
Mac guys: I envy you. I thought you would like to know that. I wish my O.S. had a Steve Jobs behind...

@DMB: Linux/PostGRE great combination, etc., but PostGRE is absolutely the wrong database here. And the Windows 7 / IIS / ASP.NET MVC stack is second to none for specifically web apps like Stackoverflow.

I am not crazy about the tiered models but there are good reasons that a vendor might make that choice. In the enterprise space, in most cases larger installs ( more machines, beefier machines..) will incur higher support costs and generally require higher costs in testing to validate the product for such deployments. So it makes sense to pass that cost to those that have such requirements. Whether this is the case for MS or not and whether the value seems reasonable for the additional cost is questionable.

Generally OSS initial costs are lower, but the complexity and time to get a stack working often offsets such savings. In some cases it may not even be that much cheaper to use OSS if using a major vendor ( Red Hat, Suse..) which also charge tiered prices.

Although the whole Vista and Win 7 tiered pricing is evil.

@Brizian: Yes, OSX only comes in awesome, but the server edition breaks the "hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive" rule.

@Jeff: M O N O!

now, that's the way to get comments and people talking about it, praise the open source and bash MS!

Reminds me of milk pricing - whole milk usually costs more than skim, but don't they have to put more work in to skim out the fat? Seems contradictory to me.

Reminds me of milk pricing - whole milk usually costs more than skim, but don't they have to put more work in to skim out the fat? Seems contradictory to me.

I hate price points in software Microsoft Windows especially. One of the most frustrating things about vista was it's attempt at segmenting the market.

Just because i'm a home user doesn't mean I don't want to be able to save network passwords or connect to an AD every so often or have volume shadow copy. Lots of home users want this stuff, home networks are common place now.

Just beacuse i'm a business user doesn't mean I don't want to be able to play HDTV.

Don't get me started on the rip off Ultimate edition.

I'm sure Microsoft will once again ruin their reputation and cripple Windows 7 in the same way.

You missed one thing. It takes more resources to host the bigger site at 37 signals. More disk, fewer clients per server, etc. It costs MS no more to flip that bit. They are just charging you more because they figure if you can afford the more memory, you can afford the more license.

If it were a change that would likely lead to more service calls to them, I could understand it, but...

All of my software is only Awesome Edition.

Oh and the prices to change version complete rip off.

I know it's been said several times here before, but this is one of the major reasons I use OSS whenever possible : OSS is never intentionally crippled, especially not because someone is holding out for more money.

When you install a piece of open source software, you can rest assured that the software in question is the real, full-featured version.

>"Yeah, remember, FOSS is only free if your time isn't worth anything."
In the last year, I've spent about a total of about 20 hours on the phone dealing with failures of Microsoft's Genuine Advantage authentication on completely legitimate copies of Windows XP.
A Linux install would never intentionally shut itself off and make me call someone in India to beg for a new magic number.

I have spent a far greater period of time (probably >200 hours) fighting with video drivers that try to "auto configure" themselves but do so incorrectly if you've got esoteric hardware requirements. I could have fixed these issues in about five minutes if I had an xorg.conf file.

I'm not sure where the idea that FOSS software necessarily takes a lot of effort, while Microsoft software necessarily 'just works' came from, but it is clearly not true in all cases.

To all who are complaining that Linux is cheaper up front, but more costly in the long run, I think you have it backwards.

Linux is cheaper in licensing, but you need a more experienced admin, who makes more money, and it takes a little longer for the initial setup. That costs significantly more.

That said, once it is up and running, it allows more machines per admin, and supports more users per machine, and allows longer between hardware replacements, so your real savings are in the longer term. The licensing becomes such a small part of the cost once you look at labor, that it really does not matter much.

@Grant
So Windows servers administer themselves without an experienced admin now? Maybe I just haven't heard about it yet 'cause it only comes with Windows self-administering edition ;-)

"FOSS is only free if your time isn't worth anything"

What's the deal with this line? I see it trotted out now and then, but it makes no sense. Does the speaker mean to imply that commercial software installs itself, has zero configuration, and never needs maintenance or working around bugs/incompatabilities/whatever? Like because it came from a commercial source means they sprinkled magic pixie dust on it or something?

Both FOSS and commercial software have bugs and issues. Usually, in either case when you have trouble you also have a choice of sitting with a phone on hold or searching forum posts. I don't really see the difference in terms of time, but at least open source gives you an opportunity to fix problems literally at the source if needed.

Just don't use Windows............. Oops sorry, I forgot, you're dumb!

@Wedge All manufacturers had a short period where they had 64 bit CPUs on 32 bit chipsets, meaning they had 4GB of addressable space, which is NOT the same as 4GB of addressable memory. Many of the other system components needed about 700MB of addressable space so no matter how much RAM you put in, they chipset could only let you access 3.3GB of it. Many companies like Dell and HP chose to sell users 4GB upgrades knowing that they couldn't get full use out of it. Some companies like Apple were honest and simply said their laptops could only handle 3GB of RAM. When they gained 64 bit chipsets laptops could address a full 4GB of RAM.

FOSS is certainly only free if your time isn't worth anything, but Microsoft is both expensive up-front, expensive in the long run, AND expensive if your time is worth anything. Let's not pretend here that "Microsoft" is synonymous with "commercial software," though -- thank goodness it isn't.

(And speaking of time not being worth anything... the new CAPTCHA system is tough to satisfy! It's just bounced me six times in row... I swear, I'm human!!)

Jeff, I think you've got a couple of things messed up here.

First of all, there's a reason I (and many others) hate Microsoft and Windows, and it's not just because Windows is a buggy bloated hyperglandular program loader with delusions. It's also because, as you're noting here, Microsoft's business practices, from stealing patents (remember Stac?) to predatory pricing, suck. in a word.

You're confusing yourself looking at or comparing 37 Signals and your pricing with theirs, though. When you buy a Plus plan over a Basic plan, you're *actually getting more stuff*. It's not "are you rich or not?" it's "do you need two pounds of computing, or five?"

That's not true of Microsoft. The code load of Windows that will use 48GB of memory doesn't cost them more to produce — in fact, it's the opposite, they're having to spend money on code to make sure that the Standard Edition is limited. It's purely a profit-making mechanism that's only feasible for them because they still feel they have a monopoly.

As such, here's a prediction: I'm willing to bet there's no version that has *all* the features and all the limits at maximum. If there were, they would have a possibility of someone buying a zillion copies and expecting a bigger discount; without it, people must buy smaller numbers of multiple versions. I'm willing to bet there's no inexpensive upgrade path either.

MS server software is for clueless small business guys and overweight government agencies ready to be price-raped. Run linux (or others) if you're serious about servers

As somebody who's spent the last week trying to work around the fact that a tech accidentally speced a server with Small Business Server 2003 Standard Edition, which only uses SQL Server Express and not SQL Server Standard or Enterprise, I concur. I was just thinking about all the usability problems MS licensing causes and was wondering why they didn't see this. I now understand why it's done, but still think they risk loosing customers if they don't quit let marketing screw up their products.

Jeff,
You are discussing about pricing policies of a monopoly provider, trying to find some rational. Unfortunately microsoft, being the monopoly, only want to maximize the profit using the "best" pricing scheme.
Look at any other unregulated monopolies and you will find same or worse pricing practices.

regarding comparison to FOSS, the issues are much more fundamental than pricing vs. free. the issues with FOSS is about the option to choose, to choose the solution, the origin and the quality. at the end, FOSS provides a richer solution albeit needing more tinkering.

Blog on system engineering
http://design-to-last.com

Serves you right. Can you please stop giving Microsoft money!

So are you going to update your "growing out vs. growing up" figures now?

I wanted to make sure you read my post on http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/1978/make-it-funner
So I spammed it here :)
Not sure who reads that.

It works the other way as well. Microsoft's pricing of (the artificially limited) Windows Netbook edition means hardware manufactures are forced to limit the max spec of their hardware.

As many people have pointed out one of the benefits of FLOSS software is not having to worry about arbitrary limits, just technical ones.

Jeff, you could save everyone a lot of time if you followed Raymond Chen's example and posted pre-emptive snarky comments. The following two gems could serve as a template:

> Serves you right. Can you please stop giving Microsoft money!

> Just don't use Windows............. Oops sorry, I forgot, you're dumb!

I will pay WHAT THEY ASK, just give me Windows 7 : the Danger Zone edition!

I agree with other statements leave Microsoft behind and use linux for your server needs. Only reason to use a Windows Server is running ASP.NET and who would want to do that...

This type of stuff has been going on for a long time.

Windows XP home is a good example. Turns out that that it is fully capable of 1) joining a domain 2) running a RDP server (even includes the necessary dlls), 3) running IIS, and many other things.

These arbitrary limits, are however, usually easy to bypass. For example, I have, right now, a XP home machine that reports as XP Pro, can join domains, and even runs a RDP server with unlimited concurrent sessions (with a local user at the same time as a remote user). Total mods: a few registry settings, a reboot, and 1 modified dll.

Looks like this memory limit you see can be patched and modded too:
http://www.geoffchappell.com/viewer.htm?doc=notes/windows/license/memory.htm

If I were you, I would start testing my app on Mono. You can keep using your existing .NET development tools, but deploy and test onto a platform with less onerous licensing.

Back in the 80s DEC used to sell computers to universities at a heavy "educational discount", and they differed from the non-discounted computers only in that they had fewer expansion slots, but...

But actually, they had the same number of expansion slots, with glue poured into the unused ones to inhibit their use. Doh!

The sysadmin at my university wanted both the expandability and the lower prices, so he first bought the crippled computers (saving thousands of dollars each), then ordered a $200 backplane replacement, which would arrive glue-free.

Hmmmmm.. a couple points i didnt see listed:

1.) It actually DOES cost Microsoft more money to support that much memory. I'm sure every server admin would appreciate it if your OS vendor that certified it to 48GB actually bought the ram and tested it?

buying that RAM(and hw to support it) didn't just magically appear one day, and it certainly was more than $5 to code/validate it.

Microsoft could sell it at the same price, but only guarantee it to 32GB, after that "you're on your own".... personally I would choose to pay the extra cash.

Tony your just plain wrong if it's a 32 bit system fair enough past 4GB is trickery and does cause microsoft work but for 64 bit systems the address space for memory is much much larger it doesn't matter if it's 8 GB 64 GB or 2 TB as long as it can be addressed their is no difference. Do you really think they tested a 2TB single system.

Life imitating art imitating life:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/joinred/

There is actually a Vista AIDS.

> "Already, I'm confused. Which one of these versions allows me to use all 48 GB of my server's memory? ... Just try to make sense of it all. I dare you. No, I double dog dare you! "

Dare accepted. It's actually right there, 1 click away from the page you linked to: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/compare-specs.aspx

The answer to your question is Enterprise, Datacenter, and HPC.

Serves you right for running servers on Windows. In 2009.

brizian: you can buy os x server edition

MICROSOFT STOLE MY NAME

GEORGE: Oh, no no no. Course not. I got a great name for our kids. A

Real original. You wanna hear what it is? Huh, you ready?

SUSAN: Yeah.

George uses his finger to draw a number 7 in the air, accompanying the

Strokes of his digit with a two-tone whistle.

SUSAN: What is that? Sign language?

GEORGE: No, Seven.

SUSAN: Seven Costanza? You're serious?

GEORGE: Yeah. It's a beautiful name for a boy or a girl... OR AN OPERATING SYSTEM!!!!

Coding Horror
programming and human factors - Jeff Atwood
Comment Submission Error

Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:

Publish failed: Renaming tempfile 'C:\codinghorror\blog\archives\001283.html.new' failed: Renaming 'C:\codinghorror\blog\archives\001283.html.new' to 'C:\codinghorror\blog\archives\001283.html' failed: Permission denied

Return to the original entry.

4.2 Writing Robust Programs

Avoid arbitrary limits on the length or number of any data structure, including file names, lines, files, and symbols, by allocating all data structures dynamically. In most Unix utilities, "long lines are silently truncated". This is not acceptable in a GNU utility.

http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Semantics.html

The strongest deterrent from using FOSS? The "community". Some of the comments here are especially strong proof of that. I'm sure it's a minority, but the rabid angry-nerd "M$" writing loudmouths sure make the most noise. Do you really like FOSS are do you just hate Microsoft? Either way, you're doing nice on the nuance, keep it up.

Good job everyone who falls under that label: you've accomplished the opposite of what you're trying to do: you drove me and no doubt many others another step away from adopting your beloved FOSS.

People who seriously believe that 37signals are actually giving you more stuff for money -- are you kidding me? Yes, you're getting more records in your tables, but this is exactly what Microsoft does -- flipping bits. There's no guarantee that you're getting more hardware resource for these money. Moreover, it's even easier for hosted service to squeeze more people on the same server and charge them more, because there's no way you can prove that your resources are severely limited. At least in Windows Server case you can be sure that you will use all 48 gigs with more senior version.

I agree with your point but I don't think you make good comparisons.

MS doesn't change the price based on whether you are rich or poor, they base the price based on what features you want. I do agree that they make it overly difficult to determine what features come with each version, but you are still paying more money for more features. All of your other examples are similar: the more expensive products offer higher performance or more powerful service.

I disagree with Tony that the burden of testing with higher memory justifies the cost. *Someone* had to test that the 32 GB limited edition would properly limit the RAM it used, and they had to do this by running it on a myriad of servers with more than 32 GB of RAM. If this were a barrier like the difference between 4GB and 5GB I'd agree: here you have 32-bit addressing vs. 64-bit addressing and that's worthy of some hefty testing, but both 32 and 48 GB are well within the boundaries of 64-bit addressable space.

It probably would have been nice (and I'm surprised marketing didn't force them to do this) if when you'd booted for the first time with 48GB of RAM a dialog explaining the situation was displayed. It'd be even nicer if you had an option to purchase a license to remove the limitation for significantly less than the cost of purchasing a new OS. I don't think MS is out of line for segmenting the market, but it'd be nice if I could buy the low-end SKU and buy new features without having to buy a new OS.

>>Linux/PostGRE great combination, etc., but PostGRE is absolutely the wrong database here.

And that would be why, exactly? I've used postgres in a professional capacity, and while it's not as full featured as MS SQL, I haven't seen anything I couldn't easily do by just doing it the Postgres way.

>> And the Windows 7 / IIS / ASP.NET MVC stack is second to none for specifically web apps like Stackoverflow.

What's so special about Stack Overflow? To me it seems like a fairly straightforward web app. Any Java framework could handle something like this without breaking a sweat. But that's a false dichotomy here. You see, we're talking about a DB server right now. ASP.NET can talk to Postgres quite well (though probably not through LINQ).

And I agree with you, MS stack is awesome. When I worked at Microsoft and could install anything from the net for $0, it wouldn't even occur to me to use something else. In the real world, however, Microsoft software is far too expensive for web companies to use. Which is unfortunate, since I'm still a shareholder.

Anonymous comment above is mine.

Quote of the Year:

"Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome"

"Ha! You have got to be kidding!!!!!! Have you ever tried to figure out if you should be paying for MySQL or not? Most people just assume that they don't have to pay for it. Some are right. A lot of them are dead wrong!"

Really? My understanding was that it is GPL. Because of this, it is completely free, as in beer or otherwise. What you would be paying for is a support contract with MySQL, which you don't need to have, and are already paying for if you have it by virtue of... well, *having it*.

had experienced a situation like this and was very annoyed...

Jeff it sounds to me like you're shuffling towards the open source epiphany.

I too used to be a very hard core Microsoft guy - a total believer in Bill Gates and the "Microsoft Way".

The epiphany came years ago when I was bashing my heag against Windows NT's networking and a friend turned up with Linux **on a CD on the front of a magazine** and installed a powerful internet gateway onto a spare machine at home. I looked at the blue screen of death, looked back to linux, looked at the price tag and a big switch flipped in my head.

Server 2008 Datacenter does have one nifty feature: unlimited licenses to all previous versions of Windows up to and including Server 2008 Datacenter (including NT4 - gross!!!!) as long as they are all installed as VM's inside Datacenter.

@anon: I sure hope his epiphany is coming! One thing Jeff seems to have that seemingly none of the Microsoft lovers on this thread has is an appreciation for the OSS way. The strongly negative comments about Linux and other OSS software here are also implicitly shouting that they would never give OSS a try anyways... they seem to be just bashing it to reaffirm that they are somehow making the right decision.

My epiphany came when I realized I don't use any Microsoft only software anymore. Actually, it came much earlier, and I always wanted to delve further into Linux and other OSS, but I was tied to Microsoft due to my gaming interests. Then I got a Wii, and stopped playing any Windows games, and realized the time to switch was ripe. I've never looked back, and never will.

I would say the comments about bad community in Linux come from people that have never touched the Ubuntu community... scratch that, they never even peeked into the community. Ubuntu is making leaps and bounds at providing an awesome community, and an awesome OS that is compatible with virtually all hardware (I have set up 4 laptops with it), and easy and intuitive to use. My dad and sister are now using it, neither of them are all that technical, and both are loving it. My other sister is itching to get her hands on Ubuntu now, too.

I find this hilarious, thank you for being so honest, most people going with Microsoft would hide this fact.

It is simple, many OS solutions are just as good, and in some way better than Microsoft solutions. You will never be burnt in this particular way. Microsoft does offer a lot of stuff, and some great development tools. But they are a real pain to deal with in other ways. I am trying to decide which license we need to get for my small team of developers, to support a growing business. We mostly deal with OS, and prefer it a great deal, but some clients just want Microsoft, becuase they have no idea.

Different pricing schemes are fine if you actually get more when you pay for more.

So a car with a bigger / better engine is one thing, and you pay for that. But the same stereo for the same car shouldn't cost more because there's more power available.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx

Now MS had to write & test large-memory configurations which isn't cheap, so the super-duper versions are trying to recoup that cost. But why so many different limits? I count 5 different memory limits for 64-bit Server / Vista

I don't agree with it either though, because once the conversion has been made, wouldn't it be better to spread the cost evenly? Should your ram come with a coupon for a free upgrade?

MS Marketing is retarded. Too many versions of windows. Too many prices, and artificial segmenting which doesn't do them any favors in the end. Some versions being specifically tailored to a market segment is one thing (ie enterprise) but Vista Starter, Home and Home Premium? Business vs Enterprise? Ultimate? No thanks.

Have you ever tried to wade through the licensing requirements for other configurations? No thanks. Like Jeff said in the last blog on out versus up, the cost of licensing really starts to hurt.

In some ways my mac which comes in just 1 version and is limited by the hardware it runs on is nice and simple. There's no 100 different versions I have to wade through. If I want extras I can buy them, and the extras aren't limited to the version I buy (iLife, etc)

@Julian good comment. Open-source zealots don't end up convincing anyone when they spew vitriolic comments.

>> It is simple, many OS solutions are just as good,
>> and in some way better than Microsoft solutions.

Um, no. That is a point of view predominant among people who have never worked professionally with Microsoft stack. MS stack is currently second to none, and most of FOSS stuff is buggy, poorly documented garbage written by inexperienced developers.

There are some gems, however. Linux is one. Mainstream DBs tend to be pretty good (they wouldn't exist otherwise the quality bar is high by design). _Some_ Java frameworks are good (but most are overengineered to heck and poorly documented). For lower traffic web sites Ruby on Rails is awesome (just remember, Ruby is really slow). Etc, etc.

As long as you know what to pick, you can build very good products with minimal pain (and no licensing cost) on top of completely open-source stack. The prevalence of crap does not bother me given the existence of non-crap to choose from. I wouldn't go as far as to say that "many" FOSS products are good, however.

When I read "Smoky bacon edition" I thought of Kevin Bacon dancing to footloose, guess you are getting the Kenny Loggins Edition either way!

Bwahahaha!
Such an old trick!
It applies to hardware too, a good one from day of yore (early 70):
The IBM 360/135 was truly more expensive than the IBM 360/125 but you could buy an on site "upgrade".
The upgrade kit?
A new sticker label for the front panel and the maintenance guy had to cut the wire of the condensator which was slowing the clock!

> 37Signals meanwhile uses the same software, but your use uses up significant resources.

Er, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but they're doing the same thing. Wolf in sheep's clothing.

Consider the $99 plan vs the $49 plan.

- 100 projects / 35 projects
- 20 GB storage / 10 GB storage

Do you *really* believe those extra 10 GB and 65 projects cost 37signals $50 a month to deliver to you?

Similarly, do you *really* believe that the cost of supporting 48 GB of memory versus 32 GB cost Microsoft $1000 per customer to build?

"... as if 17 billion bytes simultaneously cried out..."

Umm, ain't that supposed to be 16 billion bytes?

Don't US universities do the same thing - tuition fees are astronomical, but are then reduced on a case by case basis for applicants through grants and financial aid, to match what the parents can actually afford?

brilliant post and so true. when you say this.. "The money is irrelevant; the expensive resource here is my brain. If I choose open source, I don't have to think about licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing. I know, I know, we don't use software that costs money here, but I'd almost be willing to pay for the privilege of not having to think about that stuff ever again. " .. that's what I'm always telling my clients is the "handling charge" of using licensed software. In a large organization, it is a very real, and VERY large frictional overhead because even when "cheap" it has to go through business case, approval, purchasing, asset registers, maint. fees, etc etc. Then there's the procedure for getting support (which you will need because the product is opaque and doesn't work). It all requires the whole Dilbert department just to administer. Saving all that overhead is the biggest win in choosing open source.. not just saving the license fee.

When you read Joel Spolsky "Camels and Rubber Duckies" (which was linked in article, so Jeff does know about it) to the very end, you would see that he argues that for software pricing artificial market segmentation just angers users (non-artificial example: paying more for full support), and he argues against it.

I am not sure if it applies to market segmentation and differently priced plans in hosting; there to some extent you sell different products, even if it is only virtual resources (e.g. storage, or bandwidth, or users).

If they want more money out of you, they should at least be smart about it!

Imagine if, on boot it said: "Your machine has more memory than this edition supports, click here to upgrade to the next cheapest alternative."

Computers are *really* good at answering those sorts of questions automatically. Why labour the human operator with trying to work out where they fit on that matrix? Just do the calculation for them and recommend an upgrade!

Love your optimism:

[quote]Drug companies often follow the same pricing model when selling life-saving drugs to third-world countries. First-world countries end up subsidizing the massive costs of drug development, but the whole world benefits.[/quote]

That is... First-world countries end up gaining the companies more profit/unit than the sales in third-world countries. Which still turn a profit, I might add.

>> Similarly, do you *really* believe that the cost of supporting 48 GB of
>> memory versus 32 GB cost Microsoft $1000 per customer to build?

According to their site, the difference between Standard and Enterprise is a mere $2800.

Dammit, how come this is this first I'm hearing of stack overflow being available for our own nefarious purposes? I emailed you guys last fall!

Will have to sign up when sober...

If you lay all the versions of all the Microsoft products end to end they strecth all the way to the moon and back.

Think of the costs internally though, you have to develop and test all the different versions making sure they all do the slightly different things right.
And as you so rightly point out the mental overhead makes people switch, not even to open source but how about Apple! they know how to make it simple (okay so you really are paying for them to make it simple)

We had 32 GB, and we maxed that out 100%.

We added 32, and was chocked to see the result on startup. Lesson learned: Never install Standard on servers. The licensing difference is minor compared to the cost of upgrading.

@Owen: "MS doesn't change the price based on whether you are rich or poor, they base the price based on what features you want. "

The rich/poor thing is the important thing here. The features are only the mechanism that they use to divide the rich from the poor. The expensive editions cost more because their added features are valuable to the rich, not because the features are hard to implement.

If you need 48 gigs you are running a big business, and therefore you can pay more. So they create an entirely artificial limit on the OS so that big businesses have to pay more.

Contrast this with a way more complex feature like text-to-speech. If you need that, then you are blind and probably can't pay much, so it's free.

I recommend reading Joel's essay on this, it's a real eye-opener if you haven't thought about this stuff before. It happens everywhere, not just software.

>> Buy an XServe!

Yeah, buy an 1U server that runs an OS you have to pay $1K for that has such an enormous thread creation overhead, you'll need twice as much hardware as Linux (or hell, even Windows) to just run the same thing. But it's pretty. It has blue LEDs even! As an added bonus, it comes with an outdated version of Java in which Apple doesn't even fix critical security issues for six months on end. What a value.

Don't get me wrong, I write this from a MacBook Pro and I made my earlier post from my iPhone, but Apple still has ways to go before it reaches the level of Dell and HP running Linux.

Nice way to market your new product "Stackexchange" :)

Aren't Microsoft just profiling their customers, what the average setup would be for those customers, and charging accordingly? I mean, an Enterprise is more likely to buy very high spec servers, and would subsequently potentially require more support etc? A small business is more likely to have more modest servers, and, of course, less money. So I'm not sure their decision making was as arbitrary as some people are making it out to be - they did their homework on what the average spec would tend to be in the price range they were targetting.

As you say, they are really subsidising the poorer customers, with the richer customers, but they do therefore have to make a distinction as to what the extra money is buying the richer customers.

Great blog, I'm just not convinced by this post which seems to be a case of not doing your homework properly on the server front ;-)

I'm amazed that no-one has commented on that Eric Sink bloke. What a bastard! It seems the "greed is good" mantra is still alive and well.

I'm really not seeing the evil here. All MS are doing is offering different levels of functionality for different prices – giving customers the option to choose the features at a price that suits them. Isn’t this how the free market is meant to operate. (Not that I’m a fan of unrestricted free markets in all cases, but this seems innocuous).

“Sure, don't make us customers think. Unless you want us to think about how much we'd like to pay you, that is.”

I may be naive, but I’d have assumed that anyone making a business decision as to what server to buy would be doing as much research as possible before handing over the money. Really, would MS be less evil if they forced you to always buy the most expensive version, even if it offered more than you could possibly need?

“Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.”

Really, so there’s no such thing as non-awesome open source software?

My reply is missing the point, I know that, but I can't resist:

I'm sorry but I really think that's just extremely perverse to run a huge database on Windows Server.

*Why* did you choose Windows for this role?

@ Samuli: Why *not*? Seems to work well enough for Stackoverflow, which is very database dependent but still very fast and runs on a modest amount of hardware.

Or does this go against your religious beliefs?

This blog post is the exact reason why no uses MS products for anything that needs to scale past a "small" project/website/performance/etc etc.

Just remember - Microsoft owns the patent on doing this:
Dynamic SKU management
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=6442559

The problem with this is not that there are multiple versions, I want multiple versions if I am going to pay for it so I don't have to pay for things I do not want

The problem is that there is not one single matrix of features that each has (or if there is one it it very difficult to find), and the consequences of each of these features/limits are not shown

The other examples you gave are all clear, this is what you get, you get more if you pay more. Microsoft seems to be trying to get you to buy more than you need, or you risk buying something that will not do what you want ...

>"... as if 17 billion bytes simultaneously cried out..."

>Umm, ain't that supposed to be 16 billion bytes?

16GB=17,179,869,184 bytes

> OS X also only comes in awesome.

yeah awesome tiger, awesome leopard, awesome snow leopard ( ~ $29 upgrade from leopard and ~ $169 from tiger)

> Yeah, thank God that Linux only comes in one flavor.

I hope you meant FOSS. Free and Open Source is awesome for all the advantages that gives the world. Why do we have to invent hundreds of word processors, when we can invent one and move on as a Human race to newer more interesting projects. Its those "don't teach anyone what you have been taught" principles that are causing us to not advance.

What I like about this post, is it goes even further to explain this greed, where people sell the same product under different labels to make more money. We have seen it with intel chips, ati and nvidia cards, and notoriously windows.

I disagree with the hosting plans argument, since in that specific case there is some costs associated with the extra service. Extra support, extra hardware, extra resources. I guess your way would be to give everyone the same exact hosting plan, but that is not necessarily the right thing to do. Each situation is different, I agree that root kits, and limitation features should not come pre-installed (or post-installed) and we should look to the future rather than try to squeeze money of what has been made in the past.

“The problem is that there is not one single matrix of features that each has (or if there is one it it very difficult to find), and the consequences of each of these features/limits are not shown”

I agree that this can be annoying for an ordinary user, but I think people making business decisions should be prepared to put a reasonable amount of effort in to research before making the choice. And I’d have thought that calling something standard edition was offering a bit of a clue that it wasn’t going to be the edition with the highest features. Also, this matrix seems to be pretty clear about the memory limits.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/compare-specs.aspx

“Microsoft seems to be trying to get you to buy more than you need, or you risk buying something that will not do what you want ...”

I though the complaint was that they were not forcing you to buy more than you need.

@Julian:

This has nothing to do with religion.

Yes, It does seem to work surprisingly well for stackoverflow most of the time (as seen from end-user point of view).

But there are problems, as the one discussed in this very post, and many others. This is why I was curious to know the rationale behind choosing a windows server as a database for the high-traffic and desirably highly available and scalable web-application. I think it is a very unusual choice if you ask any IT professional (excluding of course microsoft's marketing department).

Samuli, the tone of your post reflects that it has everything to do with religion. That's the insidious nature of it: you believe it is unwise to use the platform, and, in the face of a counterexample, you act like it is an anomaly and try to write it off in a hand-waving manner. It is possible to run Windows server to serve a database or a web server. Now, do you have specific scaling problems relating to stackoverflow.com?

@Hatem Nassrat

"> OS X also only comes in awesome.

yeah awesome tiger, awesome leopard, awesome snow leopard ( ~ $29 upgrade from leopard and ~ $169 from tiger)"

Yeah, or you could instead pay $219 to upgrade from XP to Vista, and then another $219 to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, and then pray that it will at least be on par with Tiger this time.

While I won't comment on the practices of microsoft, I have to say that I am surprised nobody at stack overflow was aware of this limitation. Not only is it in the first chapter of any windows server book, but it comes up quite often when purchasing.

Not knowing the limitations of your OS is just as irresponsible as not provisioning the right amount of hardware for a server.

Something that appears to be missing from all of this is how do you actually go about getting from Windows Server 2008 Standard to the Enterprise edition.

Do you reinstall? Is there a straightforward authorization process you can execute from the 2008 Enterprise disc to convert your 2008 Standard in-place?

Let's assume you have to reinstall, does it go into the same Windows directory? Will it overwrite my registry? Will all existing software from Standard edition work? Should I risk doing this on my production server? I wonder how long I'll need to take my website offline to do this, maybe it would be easier just to buy another server rather than risk an unrecoverable site outage.

These are not the kind of questions you need to be asking yourself after a memory upgrade. We had a similar experience using PAE to get above the 4GB limit on a 32 bit system, but it was easier to plan ahead and use Enterprise Edition since these are known hardware limitations.

As many commenters have noted, FOSS software does have examples of tiered licensing. The one that jumps to mind is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which has similar restrictions based on number of CPUs, amount of memory, etc. The difference vs. Microsoft is that if you don't need access to the high priced support drones nor the gold stamp of "Red Hat Enterprise", then you have *options*. Real options, not just love-it-or-leave-it options. You can get the exact same versions of the software for free with CentOS ( www.centos.org ), or for a little bit of porting/integration you could easily choose another distro entirely.

I'm not slamming Red Hat Enterprise. I'm glad they are convincing the pointy-haired bosses that they need to value "enterprise support". That helps pay for the good things that Red Hat does, like supporting Fedora.

"Just don't use Windows............. Oops sorry, I forgot, you're dumb!"

What an eloquent and persuasive argument!

Not to support Microsoft's pricing, but segmented pricing may not be so much about extracting as much value from rich customers as to ensure that you are capturing the value people are extracting from the software. One of the frustrating things as a software publisher is how do you charge for the person who uses it occasionally (who wants to pay less) versus the person who depends on it for their business. All things being equal, they are willing to pay different amounts because the value they extract is different. Segmentation should try to capture that - although most segmentation exercises end up in extremely confusing pricelists, for the consumer and even the sales people selling it.

Excellent article - had me hooked with the weasel pictures.

@Jeff

> Do you *really* believe those extra 10 GB and 65
> projects cost 37signals $50 a month to deliver
> to you?
> Similarly, do you *really* believe that the cost
> of supporting 48 GB of memory versus 32 GB cost
> Microsoft $1000 per customer to build?

There's a difference between 37signals artificially crippling 37signal's service and Microsoft artificially crippling /your/ memory; if you can't see that Jeff, you're blind.

But in the end your only recourse is to vote with your dollars. Spend the money if you think it's worth it.

Hahahahaha, what a n00b!

@Simon: and how exactly 37signals is different from Microsoft? Price difference in Microsoft's offering is not just supported memory, but some other advanced things which make sence in enterprise environment, whereas 37signal's is just limiting you on the same features for a price.

There's another misconception among people who argued that different hosting tiers are actually vary in physical resources available to customer for a price. If we're talking about shared hosting, Pareto principle works in full power: 80% of people sitting on the same server will use only tiny fraction of resources of this server. Even if you pay more for "more resources" you may end up sitting on the server packed with lowend consumers and will never notice this just because their usage pattern doesn't interfere with yours.

This sort of thing pushes people toward illegal software sharing as well. For some software, the _only_ simple way to get the awesome edition is to download a cracked torrent. The awesome edition, unlike any of the versions that are for sale,

- doesn't require the CD in the drive (e.g. lots of games),
- doesn't refuse to operate when your net connection is down just because it can't check with a licensing server (ditto),
- runs on all the different language versions of your OS (e.g. lots of Microsoft stuff),
- doesn't require you to manage separate licenses for each tiny little plugin (e.g. Wolfram stuff)
- doesn't get confused, sometimes counting installation on multiple OSes on a single machine as multiple machines, sometimes not (Wolfram again)

do i have to say it? you first mistake is using MS products...

We try our best to distance ourself from proprietary software. We have been successful so far but couple of exceptions. I am sure we will free ourselves from vendor lock-ins soon.

Before any new software we write we think of the following:
a) Can the software run on all major operating systems?
b) Does the software depend on a particular database?
c) Does the software depend on any proprietary software or web services?
d) Is it feasible to release the software under an open source license?

Ideally the answer would be yes for questions a and d. Strict no for questions b and c.

@Steve - what were the opportunity costs - what might you have done with the 6 months yo uspent rewriting your code? That counts too.

In any case, I believe there is a blog post somewhere (or webpage) that discusses this limitation and the registry key involved to allow your edition to see your extra ram. Hope you didn't pay them more money...

The problem is that marketing weasels generally don't really understand their markets or what segmentation is really for. They are just regurgitating what their heard in MBA school cookbooks without any thought or consideration about what they are actually doing.

I can say this because 1) I have an MBA, 2) I do think about this kind of stuff for my company, and 3) it often doesn't really make any sense to segment a market that doesn't really have a natural cleavage point in the first place nor is it necessary to segment just because you can.

For my company, simple and painless up-scaling, up-grading of performance is a selling feature so we don't segment on trivial performance levels like this example - instead we segment on mutually exclusive functional options and performance levels that cleanly separate. Even then you can take the code or the hardware you were using and re-purpose it without throwing anything way - it's only an incremental cost rather than 3 steps forward and 2 steps back with the full 5 steps going out as cash. We sell software and hardware so it's a win either way for both us and our customers to help our customers control their costs.

These aren't just marketing weasels, but they are unthinking, mindless marketing weasels - pretty much describes most MBAs graduated from US or UK schools, sadly. It's a large part of the reason the Fortune 1000 is in such dire jeopardy but they don't even know it. Time to die.

In 2008 you ask non free softare vendors, "do you understand what it takes to build the premium experience that trumps your free competition? And can you deliver it?" Why are you running Windows Server now? The sooner you leave that stuff behind, the more time and money you will save.

Great post! and I really liked the conclusion :)

It's time to admit, Jeff, MS on the serverside = FAIL.
Rails, Django, Struts2, Wicket, GWT...

'In an ideal world, the price would be different for every customer. The "perfect" pricing scheme would charge every customer a different amount, extracting from each one the maximum amount they are willing to pay.'

Its called the barter system... I seem to remember we abandoned it a long time ago. :)

P.S. After some point 'hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive' = 'we suck at writing good code'

Am sorry master, but i failled to feel the disturbance,

I still feel sorry for those undetected bytes though!

Just the ability to use Visual Studio, and especially the Visual Studio debugger, makes using Windows cheaper in terms of money and stress equity than Linux or Mac, regardless of licensing costs.

Jeff, what I love about you is your devotion to your misconceptions.

37Signals pricing may not be fully incremental, but each new price point does involve an increase in both resource availability and a likely increase in support costs.

I assume that MS price point differentiation includes more than a simple bit flip for memory usage as well. I certainly see the difference between my Vista Home Basic and Vista Ultimate installs.

The best argument against MS for smaller businesses would be that you get penalized for success. In your case, needing extra RAM is just a side-effect of popularity. You really don't need a different *edition* of the software, except that they included an artificial limitation on RAM.

Similarly, if you set up the whole site on a single server first, and then need to split the IIS and SQL services to separate machines because of higher traffic... now, even though it's the same OS on each new machine, you're paying twice as much for software you already "own".

I don't see any problems in this kind of price differentiation. Ofcourse since you have cash you can pay more. This is true with all software products. Businesses tend to maximize profit nothing wrong with that. You might already be aware about Joel's article, MS is doing exactly the same :) . Link to Joel's article on it : http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html

Where in life dont you get more by paying more. Faster car. Bigger house. More features. More user connections from a DB. STD, PRO, ENT editions. CPU Cycles. Functins on a calculator. Safty features on a car. Air bags for a while were just on the expensive cars. Now many inexpensive cars have them. You PAY for it. We PAY for something because we dont have the resources to make it ourselves. Build your own server OS without the limits. Use open source if available. Those capitalists can profit on their hard work. If a competitor comes out with a cheaper alternative with a higher limit, then you can bet all prices will come down. I am not angry because I cant afford a better thing, I just work harder to get it. Motivation. Not class warfare crap. Save it for the Obama rally. Dry your tears and think how you can get that nice toy.

@Alex

You completely missed my point.

The various points about cars -- that you pay more to get more -- is true to a point. But the American car industry spent 50 years selling essentially the same cars under different brand names at different prices -- Mercury rebranded Ford cars and charged more; Pontiac rebranded Chevrolets and charged more; etc. But there was more prestige, apparently, in driving the Mercury version of a Ford Pinto (!).

Same with watches. A Timex will keep time as well as a Rolex; it's not engineering you're paying for when you go to the jeweler's to buy a timepiece.

@codinghorror

Have you ever considered that it might be an idea to credit the people you quote from, rather than use a vaguely titled link?

I ask, because there are at least four comments above pointing you to the very article by Joel Spolsky you quote from in this posting.

this is one reason I am experimenting with os x, weaning myself off of Microsoft, if possible. Much cheaper and very realiable, I hope. I despise all the complex Microsoft licensing.

+1 for scaling out vs. scaling up

@Wedge: Unless you've upgraded your ThinkPad's CPU, you are mistaken about which processor it has. The T60 came with a Core Duo, not a Core 2 Duo. It is a 32-bit CPU, not an x64 CPU. That's the reason for the 3GB limit - part of the 32-bit address space is reserved for the BIOS and other things.

ThinkPads with x64 CPUs can indeed address the full 4GB.

Summary: person makes wrong purchasing decision, blames others for own lack of understanding.

Example: Person buys low end Honda somehow thinking all Hondas are the same. Thinks that because the high end Honda is made of the same materials that the person was ripped off and deserves the high end one for the low end price.

Sad that this is how most programmers think. And then you have the gall to write about it as if it were MS fault that you cannot and did not understand what you get for your purchase.

And the final comment on programmer culture is how many agree with you.

Jesus Christ, Mactards are so damn ignorant that they think StackOverflow can be run on a Mac server. Does Mac even have a server? If so, I am sure it is pretty, and I am sure it sucks. Take your stupid asses back to Abercrombie & Fitch, because you don't belong behind the screen of a computer!

http://www.mindmeld.ws/blog/2009/07/05/open-source-software-awesome-edition/

"It seems like I was just talking about this in response to a previous article of Jeff’s. I guess the take away is that Microsoft is not made up of a bunch of dummies. I congratulate them on finding a way to squeeze more money out of people and have them say “Thank You Sir! May I have another?”

Jeff,
Thanks for the data point. If you ever get interested enough in evaluating Linux for your webserver, please consider Ubuntu, or if you want a more conservative distro Debian Linux. Debian stable has 20,000+ packages available for installation from any Debian mirror. Debian testing has 25,000+. Since Ubuntu is a downstream distro from Debian, you'll find it's repositories are also huge.

If you want to test drive without installing, I would recommend an Ubuntu liveCD. As I'm sure you know you know what a live CD, but I don't know if your readers do. For those not familiar, a Linux live CD allows you to run a particular Linux distro off a cdrom/dvd without having to install the software onto a hard drive. It's really nifty.

I think you'll be very impressed with what you have already available on Ubuntu/Debian. The #1 tool to become familiar with is synaptic, the graphical frontend to the package manager. Do a search by name+description for say web server, or database, or php, or mono,python, java, etc. I'll think you'll be stunned at what's already available and wrapped up to go. Also try search terms like "cluster", "monitoring", "load balance". Play with the search terms. Again, I think you'll be stunned by what's already available.

P.s. Based on your description of your home theatre pc entry from a couple of years ago, I finally decided to upgrade my 1GB ram, athlon XP 1150GHz, 160GB IDE HD, box to a 8GB DDR2, Intel Wolfdale Core 2 Duo, 1TB SATA hard drive box. Holy cow!!! Everything runs so much faster. My old box running Debian testing X86 would take about 45 secs from boot up to login prompt. The new box running Debian testing AMD64 about 20 seconds max.

>> it at least SHIPS third party software like (yes outdated) Java, Apache, PHP, etc. A simple update will suffice

Well, yes. But Sun _doesn't make_ an official Java version for Apple platform. Apple does. And Apple doesn't seem to be in a terrible hurry to update it when Sun updates theirs, even if this is necessary to address security issues. They should either fully commit to Java or stop shipping it IMO.

All of the above doesn't change the fact that OS X is a piss poor platform for this application.

>> Just the ability to use Visual Studio, and especially the Visual Studio debugger,
>> makes using Windows cheaper in terms of money and stress equity than Linux or Mac,
>> regardless of licensing costs.

Pssst. There's this IDE called NetBeans 6.7. It's pretty good, and it costs $0. Not as full featured as VS, of course, but not that far behind. Has a debugger, too. And a profiler. And code browsing / refactoring. And built in source control. And it runs on all three major platforms (6.7 is gorgeous on a Mac, BTW). And it has a great Scala plugin. Download it and give it a try, it's free in both senses of the word.

In fact, come to think of it, after working with Visual Studio for more than a decade, I don't really miss anything other than not being able to "drag" the execution point forward or backward when debugging.

Jeff - with a company like Microsoft it really pays to read what you are getting when you go to purchase it.

That said, I agree with what you are saying. It's a royal pain. Why even have a "Home Edition"? Why can't all editions have the same options, but simply do a default install with different configurations?

Okay - I can see why a server shoud be different to a client - they may need different security, different abilities and so on. But beyond "Server" and "Client" I see very little reason there should be any segmentation.

The linux migration path....

ASP.net MVV has been open sourced by Microsoft and is included in the latest mono release (mono 2.4.2)

However that where it port gets harder.
You could change from microsoft sql server -> MySql which would be non-trivial I'm sure.

Mono does not have LINQ to SQL yet (planned for September release).... which means your database access code would have to be re-written (ouch) or you could wait till September.

Even once the port is complete you would need extensive testing to make sure everything still works (hint it wont). And allow time for fixing all the problems found.

You would have to do a cost benefit analysis estimate on the work required before deciding to embark on that path.

However you are really looking at this to late. When choosing a technology you also need to factor in the exit cost. I.E how much vender lockin does this technology have, If I wanted to change to another technology how much would it cost me to do the switch. Including:
1. How much would it cost me to get my data out
2. Would my existing code just work... would I need to do a port... or would I need a complete rewrite.
3. Would I need to pay to get out of a contract.
4. Would I need to pay to licence the new technology.

Companies love vender lock-in... why?
Because once you are locked in. They can charge you whatever they like a you will be forced to keep paying. So long as what they are charging is less then the exit cost. Therefore it is in their best interest to make the exit cost a high as possible.

However it is in your best interest to make sure the exit cost is as small as possible. Or at least consider it when making a technology decision and do not proceed unless the exist cost is acceptable.

@ Johnny - Kudos to you.

See you hateful, mouth-foaming, FOSS zealots, this is an example of how you can promote the use of Linux in a positive way. You know, by praising the OS with examples why it's good, rather than resorting to ad hominem attacks on the users of another perfectly fine OS.

If he's using LINQ to SQL beyond stored procedure mapping, he's got bigger problems than licensing fees. I tried pretty hard to use it for a high performance, large DB app, and it proved to be vastly slower than sprocs, or even the good old SqlCommand. The word from folks responsible for it was that DB perf doesn't matter and I'm in a minority if I want it. Which I thought was insane. So I switched to using it just for sproc access and in memory collections manipulation.

DMB - Normally LINQ to SQL is slower than SqlDataReader, but you can compile the queries so that much of the overhead of using LINQ largely disappears.

Here's an interesting series of blog posts:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2007/06/22/dlinq-linq-to-sql-performance-part-1.aspx

The syntax becomes a bit cumbersome, but you could just compile the most intensive or most used queries, rather than everything.

I wonder how StackOverflow uses LINQ. Does it used compiled queries, or does it call SPs for the most used or intensive queries?

Note that even some OSS folks do this in a big way. The original Bitkeeper pricing scheme was, IIRC, somethiing like:

individual OSS Developer : free
Corp <10 seats: $100/seat
corp <100 seats: $500/seat
Mega corp (e.g. IBM) $10K/seat

Of course, this was probably set up that way to ensure they never had to deal with the megacorps. Today they do not have a pricing scheme per se, instead the negotiate individually with each customer.

@Julian - no it doesn't. Try it yourself in anything that requires high concurrency and low latency and compare with sprocs. And do yourself a favor - do something more intense than toy examples.

Sprocs will beat LINQ to SQL handily in all cases, oftentimes by quite a margin. That said, my run-in with LINQ was about a year ago. Things might have changed since then.

You have couched your argument by bemoaning the principle of charging rich people more and the poor less - so do you also bemoan it when applied to taxation? And should Third-Worlders be expected to pay the same for medical care as First-Worlders? I don't mind if you don't think so - just so long as we're consistent here, folks.

@David Warman: Bitkeeper was not OSS.

Jeff, here's a useful comment...

According to the BizSpark Program Guide (page 11), Windows Server 2008 Standard and Enterprise editions are both included:

http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/ShowItem.aspx?LocalizedItemId=37

You'll probably have to do a full reinstall I would think. Check with ServerFault.com =).

It's time to take ownership.

All I read is how awful Microsoft is but I can't help to wonder why? If you are about to configure and setup a server why didn't you think about the cost up front?

You should say here is my x,y,z hardware now what server edition do I need to support this? Failure to do so is failure on your part not Microsoft's. Take responsability for being your own IT / Server administrator and quit whining because you didn't do you job.

BTW, I love StackOverflow! Listen to the podcast on the day of the release.

Captcha Words: soulless montgomery <- funny!

Try this. You buy Vista Ultimate. Windows 7 comes along and it's looking to be a legitimate upgrade. You go to the upgrade site, decide Ultimate was the ultimate waste of money, and decide on Windows 7 pro. You then realize by looking at the upgrade matrix that you cannot downgrade Vista Ultimate to Win7 Pro without doing a clean install. Conclusion: Microsoft can shove it.

I can almost forgive Microsoft for the market segmentation voodoo that they do; I cannot forgive them for locking me into their 'ultimate' pricing scheme.

+1 to Wild Bob. Do your research.

Oh.. so you are to stupid to look up a edition usable for datacenters?

And don't know the limits of the software you are using?

Well... lets blame the seller, who had similiar offers since 1999....

And then buy the datacenter edition . (Hell , next you find out about the Team Edition of VS)

I assume that the Stack Exchange product means that rumors that the Stack Overflow code might one day be open-sourced are untrue...?

Oh...You want the 'girlfriend experience' :-)

> Yeah, or you could instead pay $219 to upgrade from XP to Vista,
> and then another $219 to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, and then
> pray that it will at least be on par with Tiger this time.

Yeah, and then when your Mac hardware breaks, you can pay $800 to have your motherboard replaced by a "genius."

Great day, the haters! Every time I see F/OSS goons, I want to hug MS...

So, what was the decision you came to, Jeff?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778%28VS.85%29.aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_server_2008

This is the Server 2008 memory analysis, you should Ideally be running Entrprise edition, as for the cost well if you email microsoft

callback@microsoft.com

They'll ne anle to tell you how to purchase a server expansion which is basically an upgrade disk that patches your standard edition to Enterprise edition.

Oh and I get Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition for free :) I am a student and have access to the MSDNAA which gives me all MS sotware for free [Including all MS operating systems and development software like Visual Studio 2008 Professional]

The problem Jeff, is you keeping using Windows.
Use BSD, there's only 3 versions Open, Net , Free.
Use Solaris, there's just 2 distros Open, not so Open.
Use Linux, yes, there' lots of Distros, but just go with one of the top ones, like suse or redhat.
There's also plenty of OS's from IBM, and Soracle still have supplanted HP-UX yet.

oh cool, the captcha isn't coloured orange anymore , well you're doing one thing right. Slow & steady wind the race.

@Anonymous - you would actually 'trust' an upgrade of Windows? I'd only ever want a clean install.

The arguments about OSS taking too much time entertain me. These comments usually come from people who view running linux as a pain. It's only a pain until you understand the system. Then it blissfully makes sense AND it's "free".

As others have stated, you can save yourself a lot of time/money long run if you just take the small investment up front of learning the system.

"...because hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive."

OMG! Fire the crew, buy some RAM!
Then we can change Coding Horror to RAM Horror.

It would be trivial to prove everything in this post wrong.

@Anton, You might get WS2008 Enterprise for free, however if you check the MSDNAA licensing you may just find that whilst you can use that for development purposes, you sure as hell cannot use it for a Production environment like SO/SF/SU/MSO.

While the licensing and features of the various MS products leads to confusion, I cannot blame it all on MS. I feel some of the blame lies in the procurement channel that sold you a server that needed to be upgraded less than 18 months after purchase.

I am not surprised at the anti-MS comments

@Wedge, @Martin, @Michael- Besides RAM & BIOS, the addressable memory includes other hardware memory- com & parallel ports, sound-video & other cards

The SQL 2008 specs say OS Maximum:
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/editions-compare.aspx

The Windows Server 2008 specs say 32GB maximum:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/compare-specs.aspx

Maybe you missed this?

Brings to mind the old Intel marketing ploy used back in the day with their 486DX and 486SX processors. Recall that the 486DX had the math coprocessor built in and had a higher price than the coprocessor-less 486SX. It seemed perfectly reasonable to most consumers that the 486SX, lacking a certain feature, should be cheaper than the comparable 486DX model since it would be cheaper to manufacture the 486SX models, right? Wrong. Manufacturing the 486SX was actually more expensive than manufacturing the 486DX because it involved an extra step in the manufacturing process -- disabling the coprocessor chip. Yup, the 486SX began its life as a 486DX, but Intel took the extra step of disabling the already perfectly good math coprocessor chip in order to be able to segment the market, not to mention competing with AMD and Cyrix.

By the way, this is all based on something I recall reading in a computer magazine. My apologies to the weasels at Intel if the facts are not accurate. It could well be that later on the 486SX processors were built without the coprocessor chip, but I do believe at least the initial offerings were made as described above.

@Anonymous on July 6,But 2009: I never said the program itself was put out as a GPL'ed product. Bitkeeper was put together by a group that wanted to get away from cvs. They were an OSS group which is why OSS developers got it for free. They just did not GPL it. I brought them up as an extreme example of pricing by the ability of the customer to pay.

@Mark on the 486DX/SX: Usually this kind of segmentation in the chip world is not done by deliberately disabling a feature in an otherwise perfectly good chip, especially if it is intended to be sold for a lesser price - that would take an extra step and that costs. Every 0.1c matters to them. Instead the SX was a DX with a failed co-processor. It could be sold cheaper because it failed out of the test line earlier than the DX. The automated manufacturing line just did a slightly different bond-out so the partially functional co-proc would not be accidentally invoked.

Now, one can go back further to the early TI calculator chips, which were all the same die but either different bond-outs for the various grades of calculator functionality, or had feature enable pins. Again, not really chiseling, just picking from different test grades. Also there were some EOM calculator manufacturers that crippled their systems while stocking only the one fully functional part. It's not really that the buyers are being cheated. It all comes down to commodity price management.

+1 to Wild Bob.

One of the only comments to not be so stupidly biased it didn't make sense.

@mr. Orange
>Oh yeah, and everything you do on your MS machine you can do on a >Mac (but better, obviously), so that's no longer an argument

Tried booting a game recently? :P I know, it's not a "dev thing". But that comment was so open, it was false. Try to be more precise.

@Fazal Majid
>If I were you, I would start testing my app on Mono. You can keep >using your existing .NET development tools, but deploy and test onto >a platform with less onerous licensing.

That's an awesome tool. But there's a heap of haters bashing it in the OSS community. Just because it runs/compiles C#

@David W.
>The old line of "If you want a feature, then why don't you program >it?" is no longer true

Wanna bet? Run me a game. :P Not under WINE. Emulating (I know, Wine Is Not an Emulator but it does the same things. :P) can run most games, but I like my performance on Windows machines.

@J. Stoever
>Yeah, thank God that Linux only comes in one flavor.

Which distro was that one? :P FOSS is as bad as MSFT. Only difference is that FOSS puts up nice websites slamming corporations and has "FREE" in great big letters with lots of !'s and daggers for emphasis.

MSFT has one major advantage over FOSS. If something doesn't work, you ring someone up and complain. You don't try and figure out what's going wrong, post to forums that call you names because you don't know machine code and google like mad. :P Paying really does give you benefits.

And there's only 7 distros, as compared to how many for Linux? :P
One other advantage is that you know what the MSFT license is, FOSS isn't really free or open. And still hasn't got 1 license.

@OP (article poster)

Really.. How could you miss something like that? I'm a 20yr old student and I've known about software limitations for years. It's, I would have thought, common knowledge.

@ all FOSS MSFT bashers

The day that a linux distro is on the majority of computers in the world is the day that you can tell me it's better.

@ all Apple MSFT bashers

The day Apple decides to 1, secure it's products and 2, patch them with reasonable speed when flaws are found is the day that you can tell me Apple is better.

Safari loads and runs .dmg files silently in the background without informing the user. Apple may get around to patching it the end of July. If it was IE, it would have been patched instantly as a critical update, no-one would have installed it, but at least the patch would be out.

Oh yea, I also want to be able to pick my hardware, not be limited to 1 platform (Apple) or have to browse eosteric sites to find a driver for a part (linux). One of the things that made MSFT is it's acceptance of the rubbish. It would render all websites regardless of standards comformance (IE up to 6) and would run old hardware with dodgy drivers (XP). The main reasons people are leaving MSFT is because IE7 and 8 start showing error messages when they come across dodgy coding and Vista required a reasonably new machine to run instead of a piece of junk that's been sitting in the garage for years.

ALL products have segmented pricing, "FOSS" and major corporations both. It's normal and has been so for quite some time. Get used to it. :P

And read the specs on hardware/software BEFORE you make a decision.

Above sentence with lots of !'s and daggers for emphasis. :P

So that begs the question, when are you going to Open Source StackOverflow, so it too can be available in Awesome?

I use open source everywhere and I have to think about licensing.

How could you have missed the RAM limitation of the version you opted for. I know the marketing lingo built into any MS purchase can lead any savvy user/buyer astray, but, think about it. You needed more RAM even before you started your business plan or whatever plan you had in mind. Don't blame MS for your own folly of missing the scalability aspect of your original purchase.
That being said, switch now to a more open supplier of software and of hardware if you wish to gain more flexibility and avoid the scalability trap. Scalability should be open-ended, not a closed option at purchase time. You will always need more RAM, more disk space. Don't limit yourself to suppliers who put caps on these variables: they need to be unlimited in future expandability!...

Oh the irony.

Did you employ the same weasels to segment the StackExchange market?

http://www.stackexchange.com/

;)

Linux. Or Solaris. Seriously.

Hilarious! Enjoyed this one

Hi Jeff,

You couldn’t be more wrong on this one. In fact, your observation resembles that of the misguided developer in "Code: It’s Trivial" who sees only one aspect of the situation. You’re overlooking the economics of selling bits.

The marginal cost of selling 1’s and 0’s is next to nothing. Pricing isn’t based so much on the cost of goods sold – it’s based on what a customer would be willing to pay. In other words, how much value does it give them. Of course, the software maker needs charge enough to recoup the cost to build the software along with a some profit – or they won’t be making software for very long (this is true whether it’s web-based or an installed product).

So the software maker has to guess at a price low enough so that customers will be willing to pay it but high enough to provide a positive return on the cost of development. This isn’t easy. Since the software will not deliver the same amount of value to every customer, they try to differentiate the product at various price points to match the amount of value delivered.

Market segmentation is as core a principal to marketing and economics as code reviews, testing, etc. are to software development. Anybody reading this who gets a paycheck should know that it is being funded by a sale of some *thing* to some customer – a customer who has been segmented and targeted and marketed-to. To write it off as exploitive is misguided. After all, if there’s one thing every software engineer should know is how to market. You said so yourself. :)

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001177.html

There are also the brain-dead captains of industry who never buy anything if it costs too little, because only something with a big price tag must be worth having. That's how IBM and EDS and others sold products for years. Make CEO's feel like they're buying NASA and that only scientists could make a product and that's why it has to be soooo expensive because it's soooo good.

here's where it hurts:

The cheaper Windows Vista Business would have allowed you to use 128 GB of RAM.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778%28VS.85%29.aspx

I wonder what Eric Sink means by "ideal world" regarding prices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
"In a theoretical market with perfect information, no transaction costs or prohibition on secondary exchange (or re-selling) to prevent arbitrage, price discrimination can only be a feature of monopoly and oligopoly markets[1], where market power can be exercised."

That would be my perfect world. :)

Let's see, you have a 48 gig of RAM server running an application with 100's - 1000's of users and you thought it was a good idea to buy the cheaper Standard version instead of the appropriately named Enterprise version and wonder why some things don't work.

@ Chris on July 8, 2009 1:02 AM
>@ all FOSS MSFT bashers
>The day that a linux distro is on the majority of computers in the >world is the day that you can tell me it's better.

Not sure this computes but never mind.

>Oh yea, I also want to be able to pick my hardware, not be limited to >1 platform (Apple) or have to browse eosteric sites to find a driver >for a part (linux).
All my hardware worked out of the box.

>One of the things that made MSFT is it's acceptance of the rubbish. >It would render all websites regardless of standards comformance (IE >up to 6)
Isn't it rather that a lot of site were built to be IE "compliant"?

>and would run old hardware with dodgy drivers (XP).
I like my XP box :)

>The main reasons people are leaving MSFT is because IE7 and 8 start >showing error messages when they come across dodgy coding
don't know about that
>and Vista required a reasonably new machine to run instead of a piece >of junk that's been sitting in the garage for years.
Must agree with that, I do try and grab my old pieces of junk before they gather dust though.

Thing to consider is:
if you take any segment of population, you will have a fairly constant percentage of idiots, be they MS/Linux/Macistosh fanboys (applies to any other arbitrarily chosen segment based on any criteria too)

PS: I like the recaptcha: groups humor
:)

I have to disagree with this a little. There are many areas of life where this is true, it is not the product itself but the use that the product is put too that ultimately defines it's value. A lot of software is sold on a per-seat basis, so the more users, the more you pay. Now the software isn't different, it doesnt have a special add-on to make it work with more people, you're just paying more because you're getting more use out of it.

If I rent a movie and watch it at home with a couple of friends, it costs me £7'ish. If a cinema or pub wished to show the same movie, they would pay a fee based on the size of the establishment. The movie is not special because it is in a cinema or pub(Although the cinema copy costs more to produce, this is still far below the extra they pay). You might say, "Well yes you moron, it could potentially earn the establishment more profit", but then apply that to servers, charging for the amount of profit they produce, and it all of a sudden makes no sense.

Similairly with the extra charge for more memory(And that is not the only difference, which you failed to mention), you are no doubt now using the server for more than you were before, so now you are paying more. There are probably quite a few more examples, I'll leave it up to you to think of some.

I have to disagree with this a little. There are many areas of life where this is true, it is not the product itself but the use that the product is put too that ultimately defines it's value. A lot of software is sold on a per-seat basis, so the more users, the more you pay. Now the software isn't different, it doesnt have a special add-on to make it work with more people, you're just paying more because you're getting more use out of it.

If I rent a movie and watch it at home with a couple of friends, it costs me £7'ish. If a cinema or pub wished to show the same movie, they would pay a fee based on the size of the establishment. The movie is not special because it is in a cinema or pub(Although the cinema copy costs more to produce, this is still far below the extra they pay). You might say, "Well yes you moron, it could potentially earn the establishment more profit", but then apply that to servers, charging for the amount of profit they produce, and it all of a sudden makes no sense.

Similairly with the extra charge for more memory(And that is not the only difference, which you failed to mention), you are no doubt now using the server for more than you were before, so now you are paying more. There are probably quite a few more examples, I'll leave it up to you to think of some.

Your problem is letting WINDOWS run your server. Windows is probably the single worst choice for servers. Get Linux or BSD on there, you'll be glad you did. You know, operating systems actually designed for servers.

If you run a server with Windows, you deserve all the bullshit that is likely to happen on that server. I promise you. That server's likely been cracked and infected more times than a cheap hooker because you're running it with Windows Server, not to mention Windows is too slow and unstable to be effective at it.

If you want to run a server, DO IT RIGHT. Doing it right involves actually taking time, to all you idiots who keep saying it's time consuming to set up Linux or BSD on a server. The difference between those two and Windows is that THOSE TWO don't suck at running servers. In fact, they're the two best choices!

Anything worth doing takes time. If you're too lazy to take the time to set up a server or maintain it correctly, don't get into server administration. You run a server on Windows and something happens, I'll laugh at you instead of helping you, then I'll say "You should have put a real server OS on that server, not a desktop OS that pretends to be a server OS."

It's not a programming/hardware issue, its an OS issue. Windows, even the so-called "server" editions, are NOT truly designed to run servers. For Windows to actually be meant to run servers would entail an actual complete redesign from what it actually is. It retains way too much of its desktop mentality even in the server editions to ever run a server nearly as well as Linux or BSD.

So what if it takes time? If you wanna run a server with good uptime that doesn't get compromised and can actually WITHSTAND a heavy process load, you'll stay as far away from Windows as possible as it just simply can't do it, and you'll use your brain and realize a good server will take time to set up and maintain. It's not a god-damn desktop, people.

It was a very nice idea! Just wanna say thank you for the information you have shared. Just continue writing this kind of post. I will be your loyal reader. Thanks again.