Visual Studio with MSDN Premium
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Unf. Consultants don't correctly bill for their time in Software making a "flux" of "cheap" candidates that don't understand basic economics. I don't actively maintain an MSDN (although I was graced with one this year and last) but I do build the cost of software and training into my hourly rate. Perhaps you can consider a license burden fee of $500 for any client that uses any version but the latest of Office. Cost of doing business.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. "And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" -- Robert Frost "All users always want Excel" --Ennis Lynch
I find there is a certain level of trepidation on the part of consultants to actually charge, sure they want to put in # per hour but never seem to want to add in the ancillary costs that they have just doing business. I know I was like that. Eventually when you go broke running a negative cash flow you do wake up though.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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Has any looked at the MSDN pricing lately? I do some MS Office (excel) integration for my customers so it requires that I get their version of MS Office (all the versions; 97 to 2013) to program against. To have access to Office I need to upgrade from the MSDN Pro to MSDN Premium... which costs $5000 more! Can anyone explain to me how they can justify charging developers $5000 to integrate with their products? I'm not writing the president's speeches using these installs. I'm writing software so my customers will continue to use MS products and purchase licenses. :(( I don't understand. What am I missing... besides the money to do it? :((
Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer
It's been around that price for as long as I can remember. I think there might've been a set of intermediate versions around $2.5/3k at one point each with a somewhat different set of Stuff Other than Visual Studio, but they got removed several VS versions ago because they made figuring out what version of VS you needed too complicated. Instead they collapsed it into 4 distinct tiers. 0) Express - Free; gets the job done as a basic coder but doesn't come with any quality of life benefits for developers. 1) Pro - The standard ordinary MS developer version has a fully functional VS and developer versions of the most commonly used MS server applications. Good enough for about 90% of people. 2) Premium - Adds a few more helpers to VS (but from what I've seen on MSDN I'd rather have Pro + R#er than Premium on its own); the main justification for why this one is so much more expensive is that it comes with developer versions of almost everything no matter how old or esoteric. Unless your employer has guzzled the MS koolaid you'll never need to use more than a small fraction of it though. 3) Ultimate - This version mostly exists to fleece employers who buy the best of everything no matter the cost; or Enterprise Developers (tm) fleeing the grips of irRational; for whom the handful of UML related odds and ends tossed in the bundle are actually likely to be useful and for whom $10k looks cheap. If MS were to offer a single new version at ~$3k that combined VS premium and the right to pick and choose an arbitrary few of the complete server app and etcs collection in premium they'd probably see a bunch of sales for it. The reason it will probably never happen is that most of the sales would be from customers who bought premium for a single item on the laundry list going to the cheaper edition; not people at the pro level spending up. :doh:
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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Has any looked at the MSDN pricing lately? I do some MS Office (excel) integration for my customers so it requires that I get their version of MS Office (all the versions; 97 to 2013) to program against. To have access to Office I need to upgrade from the MSDN Pro to MSDN Premium... which costs $5000 more! Can anyone explain to me how they can justify charging developers $5000 to integrate with their products? I'm not writing the president's speeches using these installs. I'm writing software so my customers will continue to use MS products and purchase licenses. :(( I don't understand. What am I missing... besides the money to do it? :((
Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer
Well, what you appear to be "missing" at this point in time, on this thread, is that OriginalGriff, Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr., and Richard MacCutchan have given you practical, immediately useful, advice, based on years of experience and hard-won knowledge, which you should listen to, very carefully.
“But I don't want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can't help that,” said the Cat: “we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.” “How do you know I'm mad?” said Alice. “You must be," said the Cat, or you wouldn't have come here.” Lewis Carroll
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I agree with your conclusions but I don't agree that they don't care. MS is made up of a bunch of developers and we're developers. I think that's just a brash and over-extended generalization. Unless you're saying that you don't care about the work you do and you suspect that all developers are the same way. Just like the company I work for, they are priced at "what the market will bare". However, I do agree that its because we generally aren't the one filling the PO. Because we are one step removed they tend to get away with over-inflating their value. I'm just saying that it doesn't make business or logical sense that they'd price it with this much excess. Yes, Fleabay is likely my next step. Got a copy of MS Office 97 for sale?
Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer
Joel Palmer wrote:
MS is made up of a bunch of developers, accountants, marketers, etc. and we're just developers and don't understand the rest of the business model.
FTFY :-D
Joel Palmer wrote:
Got a copy of MS Office 97 for sale?
The people here will probably be able to get one for you.
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
Think inside the box! ProActive Secure Systems
I'm on-line therefore I am. JimmyRopes -
OriginalGriff wrote:
You are making a couple of faulty assumptions: that MS care about developers, and the MS care about end users.
Er, no, I didn't make those assumptions anywhere.
Veni, vidi, abiit domum
Not true. Developers are the lifeblood of MSFT and we create the ecosystem from which they generate $billions of profit. Unfortunately, they do not understand the developer community. If they did, they would have free MSDN licenses for individual developers and charge for corporate licenses for those who develop commercial products. Developers like me generate huge revenues and profits for MSFT through SQL Server, Office, Azure, etc. licenses yet we have to pay dearly for the privilege (Visual Studio license fees, MSDN subscription, TFS, training fees and alike). It is just sad.
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Man up! Use Vi
MVVM # - I did it My Way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
Vi? Of course, we 'ad it 'ard. We used to get up in 't morning, scrape some electrons off the clouds, put them into the right addresses on 't chips one at a time. The only way we knew it were working were if the gaffer didn't rip the roof off our shed and drive us out wit' steam hose. :laugh:
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Vi? Of course, we 'ad it 'ard. We used to get up in 't morning, scrape some electrons off the clouds, put them into the right addresses on 't chips one at a time. The only way we knew it were working were if the gaffer didn't rip the roof off our shed and drive us out wit' steam hose. :laugh:
Chips? CHIPS!? You were lucky! We had melt sand in t'furnace - I say 'furnace', it were a lump o' coal being blown on by t' wife, and make us ain valves, t' plug togevva wit' wire we 'ad t' make oot o' fillings from our ain teef! But ye tell t' kids of today, an' they won't believe you!
MVVM # - I did it My Way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
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Man up! Use Vi
MVVM # - I did it My Way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
Vi? Vi? Vi was for wimps! It showed you your code all the time! ED and EDLIN had to be told to show us what we had typed! And if you didn't, then you just hoped what you typed would affect the right line(s)... :sigh: Gawd, was I ever happy when I found BRIEF ("The Programmers Editor") - I still wish for the windowing features it had in VS nowadays!
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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Not true. Developers are the lifeblood of MSFT and we create the ecosystem from which they generate $billions of profit. Unfortunately, they do not understand the developer community. If they did, they would have free MSDN licenses for individual developers and charge for corporate licenses for those who develop commercial products. Developers like me generate huge revenues and profits for MSFT through SQL Server, Office, Azure, etc. licenses yet we have to pay dearly for the privilege (Visual Studio license fees, MSDN subscription, TFS, training fees and alike). It is just sad.
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Chips? CHIPS!? You were lucky! We had melt sand in t'furnace - I say 'furnace', it were a lump o' coal being blown on by t' wife, and make us ain valves, t' plug togevva wit' wire we 'ad t' make oot o' fillings from our ain teef! But ye tell t' kids of today, an' they won't believe you!
MVVM # - I did it My Way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
Teeth? We used to dream of having teeth. They gave a pound of Tofu every month, and that was between seven of us! We had to suck it off the boss's doormats before letting out the Tartary Apes he used as Code Monkeys. And when they made mistakes, he'd beat us to death with Billy Gates' spectacle case.
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Vi? Vi? Vi was for wimps! It showed you your code all the time! ED and EDLIN had to be told to show us what we had typed! And if you didn't, then you just hoped what you typed would affect the right line(s)... :sigh: Gawd, was I ever happy when I found BRIEF ("The Programmers Editor") - I still wish for the windowing features it had in VS nowadays!
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
Ah Griff in his Brief days ... oh!, no, not going there. I used a great editor on TI Minis back in the day which I used for so long, I still not only remember all the commands, but sometimes find myself trying to use them. not sure whether it was a great editor, or I'm going senile.
MVVM # - I did it My Way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
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Teeth? We used to dream of having teeth. They gave a pound of Tofu every month, and that was between seven of us! We had to suck it off the boss's doormats before letting out the Tartary Apes he used as Code Monkeys. And when they made mistakes, he'd beat us to death with Billy Gates' spectacle case.
I say "teeth"! A pound of tofu! We 'ad three ounces of spit between all 47 of us.
Simon O'Riordan from UK wrote:
Tartary Apes he used as Code Monkeys
Aye, well we 'ad access to an encyclopaedia and knew you meant Barbary apes. Barbary apes!? You were lucky ! our boss 'ad an infinite number of pygmy marmoset monkeys [^] typin' out the complete lyrics of On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at[^] and when they made a mistake, he'd tell us off.
MVVM # - I did it My Way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
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I say "teeth"! A pound of tofu! We 'ad three ounces of spit between all 47 of us.
Simon O'Riordan from UK wrote:
Tartary Apes he used as Code Monkeys
Aye, well we 'ad access to an encyclopaedia and knew you meant Barbary apes. Barbary apes!? You were lucky ! our boss 'ad an infinite number of pygmy marmoset monkeys [^] typin' out the complete lyrics of On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at[^] and when they made a mistake, he'd tell us off.
MVVM # - I did it My Way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
Right. It wa' Tartary Apes because th' boss were as thick as shit. :-D If we tried to correct him, it were t' workhouse! At Facebook! Young Tim Lee brought in his encyclopedia and boss made him eat it! Afterwards he could only talk in 'Markup', which 'boss patented and turned to 'nternet. And you tell youngsters today?
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Right. It wa' Tartary Apes because th' boss were as thick as shit. :-D If we tried to correct him, it were t' workhouse! At Facebook! Young Tim Lee brought in his encyclopedia and boss made him eat it! Afterwards he could only talk in 'Markup', which 'boss patented and turned to 'nternet. And you tell youngsters today?
They'll not believe you. :) Ending the evening with a smile on my dial - thanks buddy!
MVVM # - I did it My Way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
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Has any looked at the MSDN pricing lately? I do some MS Office (excel) integration for my customers so it requires that I get their version of MS Office (all the versions; 97 to 2013) to program against. To have access to Office I need to upgrade from the MSDN Pro to MSDN Premium... which costs $5000 more! Can anyone explain to me how they can justify charging developers $5000 to integrate with their products? I'm not writing the president's speeches using these installs. I'm writing software so my customers will continue to use MS products and purchase licenses. :(( I don't understand. What am I missing... besides the money to do it? :((
Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer
Microsoft target consumers, for the MSDN Premium, are corporates and mid-size companies, not individual freelance developers. I am a consultant and I have been issued an MSDN Premium in every corporate I worked for...
Make it simple, as simple as possible, but not simpler.
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Has any looked at the MSDN pricing lately? I do some MS Office (excel) integration for my customers so it requires that I get their version of MS Office (all the versions; 97 to 2013) to program against. To have access to Office I need to upgrade from the MSDN Pro to MSDN Premium... which costs $5000 more! Can anyone explain to me how they can justify charging developers $5000 to integrate with their products? I'm not writing the president's speeches using these installs. I'm writing software so my customers will continue to use MS products and purchase licenses. :(( I don't understand. What am I missing... besides the money to do it? :((
Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer
Joel, I used to have a company-sponsored MSDN subscription which cost me something like £800 as a salary sacrifice and the company picked up the rest of the cost which at the time was something like £6000 here in the UK. It gave me 10 licence codes for each of just about all MS' products and they were perpetual licence codes which have served me well the last four years and still do. I also had 24hr support which was really worth having; it was nice to fire a vexing problem at MS and let them sit with it on a four hour response time. On one support call to do with a printer device driver we were developing they sent one of the R&D team from their UK head office to our office to see at first hand what we were trying to do. They punted it States-side and two days later we got a very detailed answer of the best way to solve the problem and they gave a sample project to prove the concept worked. It cost a lot of money initially but I got to keep the licence codes when I left the company and we got complete satisfaction from MS. To some folks in the lounge that would seem at odds with how MS do things. For me, it was really good value for money, still is, and for once, I got more bang for my buck from MS than I dared to expect. :) Nothing I write though is in opposition to Bill Woodruff's comments.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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Has any looked at the MSDN pricing lately? I do some MS Office (excel) integration for my customers so it requires that I get their version of MS Office (all the versions; 97 to 2013) to program against. To have access to Office I need to upgrade from the MSDN Pro to MSDN Premium... which costs $5000 more! Can anyone explain to me how they can justify charging developers $5000 to integrate with their products? I'm not writing the president's speeches using these installs. I'm writing software so my customers will continue to use MS products and purchase licenses. :(( I don't understand. What am I missing... besides the money to do it? :((
Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer
1. Have the customers provide the licenses for the particular versions they want. You need this on Excel 97? You have to provide me a license/copy of Excel 97. The following will not work if you have to integrate with a live, running instance of Excel. If you just need to generate files, they will work fine for batch or service based processing. 2. Consider using old, but stable formats that have been supported on all Excel versions. SYLK, DIF, CSV, etc. Many of these formats would work with the Win 2.1 versions of Excel all of the way to the most current. 3. OpenOffice + Java API will produce compatible documents and save you $5000. I doubt this would support back to 97, though.
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Has any looked at the MSDN pricing lately? I do some MS Office (excel) integration for my customers so it requires that I get their version of MS Office (all the versions; 97 to 2013) to program against. To have access to Office I need to upgrade from the MSDN Pro to MSDN Premium... which costs $5000 more! Can anyone explain to me how they can justify charging developers $5000 to integrate with their products? I'm not writing the president's speeches using these installs. I'm writing software so my customers will continue to use MS products and purchase licenses. :(( I don't understand. What am I missing... besides the money to do it? :((
Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer
While I agree that MS has lost touch with its developers and has for quite some time IMO. I will say that they have made it pretty easy to get their products for free as a partner or ISV. So yes MS has alienated their developer base, I am working hard to get away from the MS stack, and yes the pricing is crazy but they have tried to create incentives like BizSpark. Anyway just my 1.5 cents worth lost the rest. JD
Thanks JD http://www.seitmc.com/seitmcWP
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Has any looked at the MSDN pricing lately? I do some MS Office (excel) integration for my customers so it requires that I get their version of MS Office (all the versions; 97 to 2013) to program against. To have access to Office I need to upgrade from the MSDN Pro to MSDN Premium... which costs $5000 more! Can anyone explain to me how they can justify charging developers $5000 to integrate with their products? I'm not writing the president's speeches using these installs. I'm writing software so my customers will continue to use MS products and purchase licenses. :(( I don't understand. What am I missing... besides the money to do it? :((
Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer
I'm aware of a company that has > 10,000 MSDN licenses that last year downgraded everyone from Premium to Pro level subscriptions due to the cost of those licenses.
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Has any looked at the MSDN pricing lately? I do some MS Office (excel) integration for my customers so it requires that I get their version of MS Office (all the versions; 97 to 2013) to program against. To have access to Office I need to upgrade from the MSDN Pro to MSDN Premium... which costs $5000 more! Can anyone explain to me how they can justify charging developers $5000 to integrate with their products? I'm not writing the president's speeches using these installs. I'm writing software so my customers will continue to use MS products and purchase licenses. :(( I don't understand. What am I missing... besides the money to do it? :((
Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer
It boils down to business philosophy. Your point about the company depending on developers providing lots of apps is valid. Traditionally MS has been eager to encourage developers. Recent management has been more interested in bottom line and paying out dividends. When short term goals like revenue become more important than long term growth, this is what you get. From a pure revenue perspective, there is a 'sweet spot' in the demand/price curve. Everyone knows that when price is low, sales go up. High prices yield fewer sales. Revenue is the product of sales and revenue; there is an ideal price at which the sales * price product is maximized. This price change may be an attempt to find that sweet spot.
