Wiley IT Manager Saving on Microsoft Licences

It is late 1998 and I observe one of the smartest PC acquisition steps ever; the company I work for is reequipping every one using a certain application to a new specification machine.  This means a major purchase and roll out for those of us in IT.

A little background first the company I work for has one customer, just one single customer, this may sound crazy but at the time it made perfect sense and the customer was a reassuring British stalwart of the high street the business was rock solid.  They were however also extremely protective of their brand and selling our whole product line exclusively they knew they could tell us how to do everything.

One of the key things they specified was a hard encryption model to their stock and control system software, we had to run the software they provided, we had to run is with "secure" physical dongles performing periodic security authorisation checks and we did all this on a specification of machine they laid down to us.

So it was in 1998 a new version of this software was hoving into view, the specification leapt from a mere 486 running 25hmz to a Pentium III running at or over 120mhz.  The RAM requirements went from 4MB and windows 3.11 for workgroups to the then brand new Windows 98.

So it was my boss (shout out to Dave) set about working out the best platform for this.

He had previously been in charge of the purchase of new server stack from Compaq and with a positive impression he turned to them.

With a little wrangling I believe he had a roll out of 30 machines, with three years support, for £890.  In terms today this is approximately £2000 a seat and was just for the machine a 17" monitor, keyboard, mouse and windows 98.  Nothing else.

Folks had to do other tasks on these machines, not just this customer software, therefore he set about buying Office.  Homogenising the previous smorgasbord array of different spreadsheet and word processing software variously in use.

Adding Office 97 SBE unfortunately pushed the machines up another £80 per seat, this included £19 off for bulk purchase, but it was a crazy price.

But then Dave taught me an extremely valuable lesson, to play the edge cases.

Could you get Office 97 for les than £80?  Yes, you could get it for £49.95 a seat.  But only if it was an upgrade.  Hmm, what could we count as an upgrade from?

Well, it turned out Office 97 could be an upgrade from MS Works 95.  At the time Works was my go to office package, I've never felt the ease and familiarity with office ever again since.  But works was canned by Microsoft; probably because of Wiley IT managers like Dave.

For a full new copy of Works would be had for just £12.95.

Doing a little mathematics, £12.95 + £49.95 is a mere £62.90.

The company was already duty bound to pay me as part of my regular services, so installing Works and installing Word over the top, taking hours to get through all the machine did result in quite a saving.  About £400 for the whole project; meaning Dave was well under budget and everything worked as intended.

It did however leave one literally huge problem; for the next working year our already tiny IT office was overrun with these dozens of double boxes of Works and Office upgrade, just in case Redmond came knocking asking about licenses.