> Given your feedback, we have made the decision to roll back all planned changes related to internal use rights and competency timelines that were announced earlier this month. This means you will experience no material changes this coming fiscal year, and you will not be subject to reduced IUR licenses or increased costs related to those licenses next July as previously announced.
No mention of the next fiscal year, or the one after that.
Microsoft already decided they want to push these changes through -- and they will. It might just take them a little longer than originally planned but Microsoft will continue to "extinguish" anyone or anything standing in their way.
(I know this isn't a popular opinion with some of the developers here on HN -- who seem to think they are Microsoft's BFFs -- but some of us don't forget so quickly.)
Offering their customers exactly what they wanted so that they didn't go elsewhere to get it? That's just a smart business move.
No. The US courts have held that company managers have wide latitude in how they perform their duties. Managers don't have to do anything in particular, since you know, they were hired to manage the company.
They do not have have to "maximize shareholder profit" as HN commenters always say.
Having said that, the board or large shareholders (more than 5%, or a large group of shareholders) could influence mgmt. if they wanted to either via the board or the courts. But the onus is on them, not mgmt., to make that effort.
Isn't subsiding by a major market power generally seen as an anticompetitive action?
It's really just a question if it is in MS interest to make sure their "partners" always use MS products instead of those of the competition. It's not a question of ethics.
I think the term is "price differentiation". Some people get it cheaper.
Microsoft was going to yank internal use rights from the "partners". For many (most?) of them, this is the primary reason they remain partners. Without this benefit, lots of them will choose not to remain partners.
Many companies will only work with Microsoft partners. Lots of them would work directly with Microsoft if that were an option (as some are speculating it will soon be).
So there will be a lot less "partners" standing in between Microsoft and their customers. Then, at some point, Microsoft will start working directly with these customers, cutting out the middleman, sucking them into their subscription models (which will be expanding), have more insight into their operations, and will be better able to track (and enforce) licensing.
To put it a simpler way, Microsoft is simply going to cut out the middleman -- the partners -- and take their customers -- and revenue -- away from them.
Losing them would be really bad for Microsoft, because they are at the forefront installing, integrating and extending the Microsoft stack into their customer base. Think of deals in the government or education sector.
Microsoft should not put those businesses and resellers into the same basket. But they are right now and every change affects them both. Hard to get out of that program which has been running since decades...
It would be, but they won't lose them.
Those folks aren't going to just all of a sudden stop using or recommending or integrating/deploying Microsoft products. With regard to licenses for development / test / demo machines and such, the 180-day evals (which can be "renewed" for 30 months, IIRC) aren't going away and will work just fine for them in the majority of these cases. Besides, the dev shops and integration businesses aren't who Microsoft is targeting right now -- they provide value to Microsoft and will continue to do so.
There's a lot of "partners" that are only partners because of the money they save in licensing costs. Why would Microsoft really care if they remain partners or cost? Their value to Microsoft is very little (and probably a net negative in many cases) so why not force them to pay "full price" for their licenses too? Microsoft has been effectively giving them away like candy for years and years and now that's going to change. They may have backtracked, for now, but I fully expect them to continue limiting, restricting, or totally phasing out internal use rights -- except, perhaps, for the higher/highest partner levels. To Microsoft, the smaller "partners" just aren't worth dealing with at this point and this is an easy way to get rid of many of them without simply "kicking them out" of the partner program.
I've thought about this a lot deeper than I care to write about here at the moment but I think their long-term goal here is to continue to push as much as they can into Azure for that sweet, sweet (monthly recurring) "subscription" revenue (plus licensing!) month after month. For anything else -- whatever they can't push into Azure (where they can track it much better) -- they're gonna make sure that everything is fully licensed and that they're extracting every penny that they can. They simply don't need the majority of the partners in order to do this.
Microsoft, of course, is after the large enterprise customers -- the ones they can extract the most revenue from. (By the way, they can already work directly with Microsoft Professional Services and "skip over" the partners.) Once Microsoft has gotten them to move everything into Azure, Microsoft will be able to work with them more directly and provide more services to them that would traditionally be provided by partners.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I should perhaps mention that I once owned a company that was a Microsoft partner. That's been so long ago that it really isn't even relevant to the discussion, though. More recently, I worked for another such "partner" -- in name only.)