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Technology Stocks : Microsoft - The Evil empire
MSFT 479.20+0.2%Jan 9 9:30 AM EST
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To: Dragonfly who wrote (1199)6/4/1998 11:30:00 AM
From: rudedog  Read Replies (1) of 1600
 
Dragonfly -
The practice you are referring to (per-processor licensing) was barred under the original consent decree, so OEMs have been able to ship any OS they want for a while now. Also, they could always choose to do per-system licensing even before that, but MSFT offered much better deals for per-cpu licenses back in the pre-consent-decree days.

What is currently holding up the ability to do a flexible client OS package is that MSFT does not allow OEMs to load the bits unless they define the machine as a Windows license under per-system rules. This keeps companies from, say, loading all the bits for 3 possible OS flavors and letting the customer pick the one he wants at first boot.

Note that CPQ does exactly that on their servers. The server comes with everything it takes to load NT, SCO Unix or Novell Netware. How did they do it? They have NO OEM AGREEMENT for NT on servers. CPQ does not sell NT to their server customers. The NT bits are supplied by the channel partner directly to the customer, or the customer uses his select agreement to buy the bits from MSFT. CPQ chose this route rather than let MSFT tell them what OS their customers wanted. BTW they sell more servers that run SCO and Novell than NT, on a unit basis. They DO provide a very comprehensive installation, maintenance and support package through SmartStart for all three OS types.

This shows that if you are determined enough (and big enough) you can beat the MSFT protection racket.
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