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.

Software - Sharing, Piracy, Subscriptions

I'm going to hedge my bets here and assume the limitation of prosecuting me is well expired, and I'm going to talk about something I did, probably something you did, perhaps something everyone of my generation and inclination did... And that was pirate software.

The difficulty in saying "I pirated software" today is that it holds such a negative connotation, is carries prosecution and it lands you in a lot of trouble; so kids don't do it!

But back in the 1980's we didn't even call it pirating, we shared software, we lent software, and sometimes we bought it of course.  But as a kid partaking of a hobby where you could buy an old audio album for 10p or a new game for £1.99, you bought the album for the cassette and then you copied software over onto it.  The copying wasn't even done on a computer, so primitive were they, no you copied your software on a hifi, with a tape to tape, or deck to deck, cassette recorder...

This was my introduction to software, and how you handled it, unfortunate for the many companies and individuals who didn't get my pocket money, but in the long run this sharing went out and out from everyone and through every computer platform I knew until I think around the year 1999, when I sort of stopped getting involved in software sharing and started to play online games which needed a real copy of the game.

But before that, for generations of machines, we all shared and shared a like, and as opposed to the companies who lost out on revenue I think we need to think about the ethos of shareware - born in the 80's - as well as freeware and the free software foundation, which though gaining ground now was lost on the mass of 80's financial effluent.

People sell things to other people who pay for them, that's how the world goes around, except with software, where the bits and bytes can be facsimiled, copied, duplicated in less than a blink of the eye.

In this special realm of software I believe that still paying for games at the extortionate prices they are is getting rather boring, we went from avoiding paying for £1.99 games, to kids today demanding - and getting - £49.99 games regularly.  It boggles the mind.

Copying or pirating those games does go on, but with the hardware level of entry and risks of prosecution involved it is very much an underground and unspoken topic of conversation.

However, you ask a real enthusiast about pirating older software "back in the day" everyone, and I mean everyone, worth their salt will have a story to tell.

And armed with hindsight, as well as the up-swell of Free to Play online titles (World of Tanks, WarThunder, Heroes and Generals, Unturned, D&D Neverwinter etc etc) you have to argue their production value is as much as any on the shelf for £49.99.  Except they're free, if you so chose you could sit and play for ever for free.  This may not benefit the developer, as you're not paying for content nor paying for the title, but if you did, employing Micro Transactions or subscriptions to attain a bleeding edge, as they do.  Then you are paying less for a game you might potentially play and get more from.

Also, with such transactions you can choose how and where to make them, £19.99 for a head start in a new game you've already gotten into for free is not a bad idea, when you could have been paying that same for a Subscription to World of Warcraft or Eve-Online, and simply not playing enough to warrant the money spent.

So how does this come full circle to the good old days of sharing software?  Well, we used to share by having face to face meet ups, we would physically carry the cassette, or floppy, or even magazine with the code written within from person to person.  With the internet today this is redundant... But should it be so?...

Could there be a place in the world for a face to face software meet & greet?...

P.S. My story of pirating, was with a lad at school who thought he was the bee's knees... 

I remember him arguing with and calling another kid dim because the kids said "CD's turn around in the player", and this "cool kid" strenuously denied they turned... "They don't spin around you retard" he said... Zahid... Richard was right, CD's spin you fuck-tard...

Well, this same Zahid thought himself the Godfather of pirate video, probably because he'd made a copy of beatlejuice and shared it around his mates.  But he came up to me and declared "What do you know about cassettes, how do you stop them being copied over?"... I of course knew, you just remove the plastic tab... but this moron was so above and beyond himself he thought this was special knowledge...

The fact it was printed on every video cassette manual said how much he read the dim wit fuck that he was, but he was happy to try and take the piss out of me for "not knowing", and when I knew he just wandered off mumbling.

It is dick heads like him out there now breeding kids who demand £49.99 video games and he's probably providing them from his dole money, but I still think a trick was lost, if we'd just educated those types to share like we all did... Perhaps today the software landscape would be different...