NW -
They either said or meant ASPs. MSFT has already said that in the "PC Plus" era, per-use licensing will be an increasingly important alternative. MSFT itself intends to be the ASP for its products. The models I have seen show that this is essentially a wash in terms of revenue - a big corporate customer can by the whole Office suite for a few hundred and upgrade for half of that - which works out to about 50 cents a day for the whole suite, per user. By the time the ASP stuff is figured in, it comes to about the same. The difference is a small shop can get access to EVERYTHING and only pay for what they use. So it's a convenience issue not a cost issue - you always get just the right product and also the latest version.
As far as the "thin client" model, CPQ is the runaway market leader in that space, with about 60% of the business. They have been pushing Citrix Winframe with a "terminal" from Wyse (which CPQ OEMs I think). The goal is to get the server business. The economics of that approach have not changed much in the last few years - the "thin client" is about $200 and will probably go to $100 in a year or so, but it takes a fairly hefty server. The initial capital "cost per seat" is about $1500 as opposed to about $1900 for a traditional client-server solution. However, CPQ makes $1300 in server money per seat in the "thin client" design, but only $200 per seat in server money on the "traditional" design. I would imagine CPQ would love to see the world go to the "thin" model - since they make good margin on servers and lose money on clients.
There is an intermediate model which uses a "light" client and allows much more choice about where the data ends up.
The "thin" model seems to fit about 15% of the market, and may gain more share if the ASP model takes off.
These guys always make last year's news seem like a big deal. |
