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23
Oct
2008

Dear Microsoft, here is my $0.25 Windows license fee for the month

by William (@vambenepe on Twitter)

Pricing is now available for Windows instances on Amazon EC2. More than the technical availability of Windows AMIs, the fact that you get pay your Windows license fee based on usage is a major change. This is where Microsoft’s announcement goes beyond Oracle’s EC2 announcement at Oracle Open World.

But why stop at EC2 instances? If I can do it there, why can’t I do it at home? Considering how rarely my home desktop is booted to Windows, I would love to pay my Windows license in a metered way. It would basically be limited to time spent editing video and participating in family Skype videconference (at least until I manage to get Skype full screen video to work on Ubuntu).

After all, why only Amazon and not other Cloud providers. And when this happens, I think I may become a cloud provider myself. It would be a small-scale operation. One physical CPU (my desktop). And one user (me). I would meter my usage and dutifully pay Microsoft every month based on the number of hours during which I was running Windows.

How much would that be? Well, a Linux Small Standard Image EC2 instance (the closest thing to my aging desktop) costs $0.10 per hour. The Windows version costs $0.125 per hour, so the Windows license on this machine costs 2.5 cents per hour. On a given month, I don’t use it for more than 10 hours (edit/render one DVD plus a few hours on Skype). That’s 25 cents. Does Microsoft take Paypal? Is the Microsoft tax about to get more progressive?

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft manages to be flexible on server OS licensing (where it has plenty of competition) and while keeping its highly profitable (and unfairly front-loaded and restrictive) desktop OS licensing intact.

[UPDATED 2009/1/19: What do you know, here is a Microsoft patent for a "Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience", found through this article.]

Related posts:

  1. Updates on Microsoft Oslo and “SSH on Windows”
  2. Cloud + proprietary software = ♥
  3. The necessity of PaaS: Will Microsoft be the Singapore of Cloud Computing?
  4. Windows XP Service Pack 3
  5. Microsoft’s Bob Muglia opens the virtualized kimono
  6. Native “SSH” on Windows via WS-Management
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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 8:48 am and is filed under Amazon, Business, Everything, Microsoft, Utility computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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One Response to “Dear Microsoft, here is my $0.25 Windows license fee for the month”

  1. William Vambenepe Says:
    January 22nd, 2009 at 8:45 am

    Closing comments on this post because for some reason it is getting a ton of spam comments. Email me (see contact info in about page) if you’d like to comment.