Comment by jrcii | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrcii | Hacker News Reader

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I lived through the exact same disaster. I spent HOURS on the phone trying to acquire a license for Windows 7 Enterprise, I needed it for Hyper-V. Microsoft's main number, dead-end IVR system. Tried the Microsoft Store, they routed me to the dead-end IVR system. 50 or so minutes after my initial attempt I got some person that could barely speak English from India routing me to a voicemail, a couple of times Microsoft's phone system plain hung up on me after having me on hold for 20+ minutes.

Eventually I got some person at a Microsoft Store felt bad about the whole thing and took 2 days to get a number for a rep a CDW who could get me the price. That rep didn't have the price, but took my information after a 15 minute call and promised to get it to me. When she did days later, she couldn't give me a final price because she forgot I needed a user CAL and a remote access CAL. When I went to make the final purchase, she said oh, actually we can't do it because Microsoft won't sell the Windows 7 license anymore only Windows 10.

The whole process made me feel like I was losing my mind.

Unfortunately, that is common with many large companies, including Microsoft. I've practically begged them to take my money but sometimes nobody seems to know how to do it.

In the past I've heard that if you need an XP license and Microsoft won't sell one, installed a pirated version of XP and then let it do it's genuine windows check, which will fail. Right after it fails, you are given a way to actually pay for a license. I'm guessing this no longer works, but it did for a while.

And even they have not supporting Windows XP now. I have used Windows 7, 8 and Windows 10. But still loves XP.

Nobody knows what Microsoft wants to do, they have Acquired Nokia but nothing goes well.

> I spent HOURS on the phone trying to acquire a license for Windows 7 Enterprise, I needed it for Hyper-V.

I'm not sure why you're trying to do that.

Windows 7 cannot run Hyper-V. You can install the Hyper-V Manager on Windows 7, but that only requires Pro or Ultimate. [1]

Client Hyper-V was only added in Windows 8, and you only need Pro. [2]

[1] https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/f0f1dc3d-9...

[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/b8/2011/09/07/bringing-hype...

Windows 7 was the VM, not the host.

> Windows 7 was the VM, not the host.

Oh. Then I agree with you that Microsoft screwed up the licensing -- but it's a different screw-up.

Windows 7 Ultimate is just like Windows 7 Enterprise, except for the virtualization rights. With Enterprise, each license allows 4 concurrent VMs. With Ultimate, you only get one.

The original idea of Ultimate was to be a consumer version of Enterprise. You didn't have to go through a salesman. You could just buy Ultimate on Newegg or Amazon.

However, Microsoft crippled Ultimate by putting in the 1-VM restriction. Considering how much Ultimate cost, this was a really cheap move on Microsoft's part.

"I lived through the exact same disaster."

Might it be easier to just get an OS-level subscription to MSDN ? I got one of those a few years ago for rsync.net and it was quick and easy to purchase ... and then we had everything.

Certainly more expensive to get MSDN than a single OS license, but it's not that expensive ...

MSDN is not licensed for production, I assume you mean you're using it just for development and testing.

MS Partner on the other hand is licensed for internal-only production use.

"MSDN is not licensed for production, I assume you mean you're using it just for development and testing."

Oh, right.

Yes, we just used it to test clients against rsync.net.

Recommended (MSDN, that is), if you're in that situation...

Reminds of the time when I wanted to get a license for a piece of software and they only offered training courses for teams coupled with a software license. I chalked it off as being outside their customer target group.

Which software was that? Sounds very "enterprise".

It wasn't enterprise, but the company is nice to the community otherwise, so I don't want to name them here. They just didn't seem to have single-developer target as part of their sales process.

You are supposed to use downgrade rights, which every VL agreement have.

"The whole process made me feel like I was losing my mind."

And perhaps Microsoft shareholders are beginning to feel as if they might be losing their capital soonish... This sounds like The End.

A tad hyperbolic, don't you think?

Not necessarily, it's entirely possible for a company to severely damage itself by creating too much friction in the sales process.

This is the sort of thing that helped kill Sun, although the circumstances were sufficiently different it wouldn't play out in the same way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11601146 (especially when much of the competition is entirely free, e.g. AWS doesn't run on Windows).

Same thing with Xerox not all that long ago, they had a near death experience because the salesmen got so much pointless process larded into what they had to do to do their jobs. Note also one of the newer HP CEOs who upon getting his job said that one of his top priorities was streamlining the sales process.

Microsoft had a train wreck with Windows 8. They're on track for another train wreck with Windows 10 that they seem to be actively compounding at every turn by adopting a customer-hostile strategy. They're supposedly shifting towards more cloud- and device-based models as a corporate strategy, but being comprehensively out-competed in both markets on almost all counts by other big tech firms. And their share price has been pretty flaky since it became clear how Windows 10 was actually going to work.

At some point, the hyperbole starts looking like a plausible assessment.

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