News Microsoft hikes enterprise software, cloud prices

Apparently it's a price worth paying, at least that's what someone told me.

 

You can only wring a sponge so hard.

 

When I visited the UK earlier this month it was shocking to speak with people and listen to their stories of how they are affected by the travesty that is Brexit. I spent some time with the owners of a small-ish book publisher in England who sell their books all over the globe and the weak pound hurts them quite a lot. And other friends who have saved up quite a bit of money in different currencies/shares, some of it now slowly depreciating. I still have to meet anybody being happy about leaving the EU. And that's not taking into account what would happen if the UK left the single market...

I still cannot see any benefits from Brexit. Not for the UK, not for the EU.

 

There an awful lot of British people who are not happy (putting it mildly) that the Leave Campaign of lies, racism, xenophobia and false promises won the referendum. I for one voted to remain in the EU.

 

implying of course that if you voted out, you therefore must be a racist xenophobe. jog on man.

 

I'm a big fan of freedom of movement and more integration into the EU. But I voted leave. It's just become a big expensive machine that benefits large companies and hinders small business. All the small manufacturing firms I know have actually done OK, and I've seen a lot of business deals coming from outside the EU that look good for the future. The markets look bad at the minute due to the uncertainty and the fact that we haven't even started the process to leave yet, it will be 2-4 years before we will probably see the market stabilise.

 

I wondered how long it would take for this to turn into a Brexit debate.

Hello. My name is Ben, and I'm very happy that we're leaving the EU. Make that "1".

 

The pound has been falling vs the US Dollar for almost a decade, in other words, brexit is nothing more than a scapegoat if people blame it for price hikes on imported goods. (of course that may change in the future as brexit is actually implemented, but not in the here and now).

 

Have you never heard of the proverb about sleeping with dogs and waking up with fleas?

Personally i wouldn't use the term racism as i feel it's been so overused it's starting to lose all meaning, however i would without doubt say xenophobe ran deep throughout the leave campaign and some of their supporters, as can been seen in the evidence.

 

Microsoft sees quick way to make extra cash? Computer tech in general for the last 2-3 years has been increasing at a near grandual 10%. Its only SSDs and Memory that have saw mass decreases.

A high end motherboard these days starts at around £300, was around £150 as little as 5 years back. GPUs have been on a price gouge for years.

6700k is what £340? 4790k the chip it replaced was £260 on launch.

 

I'll just leave that here.

And now I will try to go BTT:

I am not surprised that MS are increasing their prices, they don't have many cash cows left. Gotta milk the corporate world for what it's worth.

 

24th Oct 2007: £1 = 2.04 USD (pretty much peak)
24th Oct 2008: £1 = 1.58 USD (almost a quarter of the value gone)
Since then it has never recovered.

 

A few articles back people were slating Microsoft with all kinds of weird and wonderful tones.
Now because they are acting like a corporation, Brexit is to blame, hehe.
If anyone thinks corporations won't capitalize on currency devaluation (including manipulation by central banks) They are fools for thinking so.

The fact they are targeting loyal entreprise customers will hopefully be remembered when contracts are renewed and upgrades are sidelined.

Reminds me of an old saying, "A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him." and one from the great confucious "If your conduct is determined solely by considerations of profit you will arouse great resentment."

Maybe my IT dept will just drop that Office 365 upgrade in the pipeline and keep the old exhchange system that is bought and paid for and works quite dandy as is.

For home users, Which is also a massive market for Microsoft. They might just price themselves back into the arms of piracy. It would not be the first time.

 

They have to be very careful, ChromeOS did very well in the back to school spike and the news that Win 10 use dropped, while Win 7 increased, means they should hold back from anything that appears unfavourable to the home market.

 

If wages went up as well it wouldn't matter as it would just be bigger numbers on both ends of the equation, the norwegian currency has developed in a very similar fashion to the pound when comparing both against the USD, yet look at how incomes developed:



But yep, all of that predates brexit which is just a convenient scapegoat as companies can point the blame at the people who voted to leave.

 

So you want us to believe that the drop in 2016 was NOT related to Brexit?

You claim that the drop in 2008 (a global financial crisis which was especially bad for a few countries including England, Greece and Iceland) left the pound weakened at 1.58 USD. True, but if you look closely at the numbers shortly before Brexit, the pound was between 1.45 to 1.50 USD. Which is not a spectacular decline for an 8 year period, is it? Today it is around the 1.20 to 1.25 USD mark. THAT is spectacular, if you ask me. A drop of 8 to 13 cents over 8 years against a drop of 20 to 30 cents within a few months. That cannot be completely unrelated to Brexit, can it?

Sorry for derailing the thread.

 

Not saying it was a spectacular drop in the time in between, the problem is that there never was a proper recovery resulting in the drops being cumulative.

 

Of course the recent currency drop is related to Brexit, but that doesn't mean Brexit is the only reason - or that Brexit itself a bad thing. Currencies fluctuate all the time, that's what they do.

I was born in 1975, and in my lifetime it's done the following:

1975 - GBP hit a high of 2.43 against the dollar
1976 - Fell to 1.56
1981 - Back up to 2.45
1985 - Collapsed to 1.04
1988 - Back up to 1.89
1989 - Down to 1.50
1991 - Back up to 1.99

And on and on and on, etc, etc...

Up and down like a yo-yo.

Just like the Euro itself actually, which launched around $1.06, dropped to about $0.82, soared to $1.59, and currently sits around $1.11.

In none of those years did the world end, either for Britain at our lows, or for Europe or America at theirs.

Do you know what would have happened if Britain hadn't voted for Brexit? Sterling would have fallen anyway because of the underlying fundamentals, maybe not quite so sharply, but probably not much different.

A temporarily more volatile currency is always to be expected at a big event, it doesn't mean it won't settle down when everyone realises the world hasn't ended after all, (as everyone who's old enough to remember the phrases 'y2k' and 'millennium bug' can attest). I personally think the issues of long-term national sovereignty are more important than a little short-term currency instability, but then that's me.

I spent years negotiating contracts with companies in different countries around the world: The whole of the Americas, Asia, Australasia, Africa, the Middle-East. Pretty much everywhere. But I spent about 6 years primarily focused on Europe and the UK, Europe probably being over 50% of my business.

Europeans? Nice people.

Good to do business with. Nice places to visit.

I, like most people I know who voted to leave, want us to carry on being friends with them. Not just want to carry on trading with them, but to carry on being friends with them. Good neighbours.

I just don't want to be governed by them.

I don't see why that's so difficult for some people to understand.

If I don't like my government, I want to retain the right to 'sack' them at the elections polls - which we can't do with the European Commission, (the executive branch) as we the public don't vote for them. It would be like America having their president appointed - exactly how absurd is that?

So for all the petulant talk of 'racism and xenophobia', frankly that's so insulting I won't even dignify it with a response.

And getting back to the core purpose of the article, (at last) people understand that if the currency drops 10% then of course prices will go up accordingly, but if companies start putting prices up beyond any reasonable costs, then as Tynecider, SexyHyde and others said - most people will recognise and resent opportunistic price-gouging.

And they will remember it.

 

Resent it all you like but that's not going to to change the fact that companies across the UK are now facing big rises in IT costs that are eventual going to be passed onto their customers who for the last 10 years have seen incomes heading south.