Frantz figured this was about his Microsoft software licenses, so he kept offering evidence that he was in compliance. Tennant concluded that Lawless was trying to intimidate Frantz to land a software deal.
They were both wrong. It’s sleazier than they imagined.
See, Janet Lawless doesn’t work for a part of Microsoft that enforces licenses. Frantz thought she did. You’d think so too if you got a letter saying “a preliminary review ... indicates that your company may not be licensed properly,” then a follow-up saying “since this is a compliance issue, I am obligated to notify an officer of Auto Warehousing of the situation and the significant risk your organization may be subject to by not resolving this situation in a timely manner.”
Lawless kept insisting that Microsoft should send a consultant to Auto Warehousing to inventory its software.
But Lawless doesn’t enforce licenses. The clue is her title: She's an engagement manager. That’s right — Lawless’s job is to drum up business for Microsoft’s consulting operation. In this case, that’s Microsoft’s software asset management consulting business.
Interesting to see MS, um, “servicing” their customers... in the most agricultral sense of the word.
So... how do’ya reckon the multi-billion-dollar monopoly would react if I were to write to or call their customers letters saying things like:
Shiny New Pinstriped AusMS Licences P/L are acting to prevent any repeats of shameful and expensive licence verification fines or even court hearings. In order to be sure that your site is not facing fines along the order of $3000 per computer (that would make around $300,000.00 for 100 computers), the installed and registered software on every computer will need to be validated by consultants.
We typically validate a clean ownership record at a mere 10% of the potential fine-cost.
Microsoft themselves have gone firmly on record as saying that they are extremely disappointed by such mistakes and have gone to very obvious and active courthouse lengths to stamp said mistakes out.
If the software records are not completely balanced, we have low-cost and secure solutions which can be applied effectively in the majority of cases for a fraction of even the reduced fees. The applicability of these robust solutions will be considered during your initial licence analysis by these experienced consultants; this analysis is expected to save your company about $270,000.00 per hundred computers, and will typically go on saving you maintenance costs for a very long time.
So... we see an instant $30,000-ish in consulting fees for a month or so’s new and relatively trivial work, the customer “saves” several hundreds of thousands and much court-raised blushing, many software licenses become validated, is everybody happy now? Welcome to Real Life: the answer is of course “No”.
You might note that the claim doesn’t limit the invoicing to $30k, it sets it only as an expectation, which can of course be “negotiated” when licence muckups are pretty much inevitably discovered.
It would be fascinating to see how MS complained about one’s own efforts to seriously validate customers’ licensing. Would there be any SCOXish resonances?
Comments