The manager/bizdev/MBA on the team sees a loss to their budget. To CYA they want to fix that budget issue, but they are only looking at the short term cost not the long term. The "I just can't make it free anymore." statement shows this with the "I" word, only thinking of their short term focused budget.
But the long term point is this:
> But many development shops, as the one I'm in, are so dependent on Microsoft and the partner program, that switching is nearly impossible...
Most Microsoft partners have high switching costs, higher because they get lots of it free, so developers/network/technology teams are locked into Microsoft due to this. These policies helped build the Microsoft product adoption.
Just as anything that is free, some of those free licenses led to pay licenses, and some wouldn't be used at all without free licenses. I have seen this with many Microsoft products and it is really how products like Windows and Photoshop came to such widespread use, people got it free or pirated it and eventually the purchases came.
It appears this manger/product lead is more focused on the business metrics of short term and right now rather than historical policies that locked lots of teams/partners to Microsoft.
This plays out over and over at organizations:
- If the engineers/designers/developers/product people win, they keep the long term programs and research and development going that builds better products to bring people in making marketing and business multipliers easier.
- If bizdev/managers/MBAs win, they cut all that out because short term it looks better to them. To them the 'open' mode [2] and research and development or free programs hit the immediate bottom line but it may not be clear how much they are responsible for the products that are marketable. Much of that is customer adoption due to good policies around engineering/product/design that these types start to strip away because they don't have a clear ROI but may in fact be a big reason for success.
A bit of the Ballmer era tried to come back from the dead, they put it under the lake like Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th for a while again.
This is the age old battle in innovative/technology/product companies. Looks like the engineers/product/developer side won this round which is a good sign for Microsoft.
Bizdev/MBA/manager/marketing/metric focused companies kill the long term product lifeline and the 'open' mode every single time [2][3]
This is also mentioned in 'How Software Companies Die' which is almost law now:
> "The environment that nurtures creative programmers kills management and marketing types - and vice versa." [1]
I wonder when this knowledge will make it back to HBS MBA business school, there are plenty of examples in the market.
Business and marketing should be the multiplier of your value, they are not the value creators. The product / engineering / creative / research / development / design departments and the people you have are the value creators and customers are also a stakeholder that must be considered long term not just short term.
Product development has two sides, value creation (engineering/design/product) and value extraction (MBA/bizdev/marketing). It is a balance, when one side has too much power, it kills the product but much faster on the value extraction side. In most cases, lack of power in the value creation side ends the company or leads to stagnation because all the value and grace is extracted.
[1] http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/rants/how-comp...
[2] https://genius.com/John-cleese-lecture-on-creativity-annotat...