Roger -
I've snipped out the relevant portions of the article i.e. the ones that relate to price differentiation.
In a recent interview, Rich Tong, Microsoft's VP of marketing
for the personal and business systems group, said Microsoft
realizes it must maintain a price advantage for NT. "We can't go
to customers with [only] a 5 percent difference [between NT and
Unix pricing]," said Tong. Microsoft is also working on a
lower-priced NT bundle for small businesses. "Believe me,
[NT/Enterprise] will still be the `meal deal' of the century,"
Tong said.
But even under the new pricing model, the difference between
some Unix and NT machines may be negligible. For instance,
Digital Equipment sells a basic, single-processor Alpha-based
server with Unix for $29,900 (an absurd price),
while the identical machine with NT is $25,195.
Adding another $2,000 or $3,000 to the cost of the NT machine
by increasing the license fee for NT Server Enterprise Edition
would leave a much smaller difference between the two.
Given Unix's nearly 30-year history and its legendary stability,
NT could easily lose in many bidding situations. At the high end,
NT will still have to compete with Unix on a feature-to-feature
basis.
"It's a big issue," said Aristotle's Xu, who uses NT 4.0 and SQL
Server 6.5 to support an 80-Gbyte database of voter-registration
information. But the database will eventually require a server
that scales beyond the standard Windows NT. When that time
comes, the price issue may come into play, said Xu: "I may look
at alternatives."
Pete Starzewski, a network systems administrator with Green
Bay Packaging Inc., a manufacturing company in Green Bay,
Wis., recently compared NT and Unix to support an electronic
data interchange application. Starzewski chose a $35,000 Unix
machine from Sun Microsystems over a $15,000 NT box from
Compaq. "It's an application we felt had to be running 24 hours a
day, seven days a week, for months at a time," he said.
Starzewski believes add-on costs make NT more expensive than
it first appears.
Unix vendors are ready and willing to welcome any NT
defectors. "This blows any claim that NT is cheaper than Solaris
out of the water," said Brian Croll, Sun Microsystems' director
of server software products. "Microsoft's coming out with Lexus
prices, but they're selling a Toyota."
The perceived price difference between NT and Unix has already
closed for some major applications. Companies such as Baan,
PeopleSoft, and SAP charge the same to run their enterprise
applications on NT as they do on Unix. Likewise, Oracle and
IBM both have just one price for their database products,
regardless of platform.
But that kind of pricing parity is the exception, not the rule. IBM
sells more than 100 software products that run on both NT and
Unix, but it doesn't attempt to price those products identically.
IBM is guided more by what Microsoft and Oracle charge for
competing products when it sets its prices, marketing VP Attal
said.
NCR also charges what the market will bear. The base-level
price for the company's Top End Server
transaction-management software costs the same ($2,700 per
server) on Unix and NT, while its high-availability product,
LifeKeeper, costs twice much on Unix ($3,000 per server) as on
NT. The reason: LifeKeeper faces more competition in the NT
market.
While the new versions of NT and SQL Server will let users do
more enterprise tasks on Intel-based hardware, it may turn out
that the cost savings from doing so are slimmer than users have
come to expect. One of the major factors in NT's favor-its low
cost-is about to get more complicated. |
