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20th December 2001 |
XPENSIVE OR NOT? |
Brian Grainger |
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In the last couple of weeks the extra front cover advertisement pages on the trade papers I read have, in one case, raised a question and, in another, provided the answer. Let me explain. First came Sun with their advert. The cover showed a familiar blue sky and clouds background with the only legend: xp ensiveOpening up the advertisement reveals details of Sun's low cost desktop environment, Sun Ray, which is going head to head with Windows XP and Office XP. Sun's approach is to use Solaris servers as the workhorse with what they call desktop appliances for the user. These are basically what used to be called net computers when they were first envisaged a view years ago by Larry Ellison of Oracle. They do not do any work. They just act as terminals. Sun promotes the equipping of this desktop with Star Office, the open source competitor to Microsoft Office. All in all the software is cheaper and easier to maintain than the Microsoft competition, hence the 'xpensive' legend. The second advertisement came from Microsoft and included a free Trial CD for Technet with details of an offer to subscribe to the Technet product. Actually the trial CD is quite good as it gives the Microsoft Knowledge Base at the time of the CD pressing. In this case it is December 2000 so they do not send out a current version as a freebee. Opening up Microsoft's advertisement gives you an offer to join Technet plus for the cost of Technet standard. The prices quoted for yearly subscriptions are: Technet Plus normally: £345 + VAT Now it was not long ago, (1999), that I was not employed and I was thinking of subscribing to Technet. I am pretty sure that the price then was £159 + VAT. That means that in 2 years the price has increased nearly 51% and you still haven't got the top of the range product. Obviously Microsoft software is not included in the retail price index! |
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