Portrait of me as a BI Country Bumpkin
Call me a country bumpkin … naif to the ultracost curve pricing practices of the IT industry. But note to Judge Colleen Kotar-Kotelly: please explain to me why Microsoft could be found guilty of unfair pricing practices in the case of Netscape where the company deliberately gave a way for free its IIS Server and IE Browser to “cutoff the oxygen to Netscape” and wrest away the dominant position in the Web world and not get a peep for pricing a complete BI Stack at zero when selling their new SQL Server 2005 database.
My gosh … I am getting strange emanations – almost as if there were brain waves coming from the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City where Flower Mountain man rains again!
I hear the soft dulcet tones of a feminine almost Irish lass saying –
“You dolt – for the first and last time here are the top ten reasons why Microsoft is naught naughty but really rather nice and loved everywhere in the BI World:
10)They have a permanent Texas Presidential pardon;
9)With MySQL giving away a database for free and Pentaho planning to give away a complete BI Stack for free – the low price point has been set at zero already in the BI marketplace . The fact that Microsoft is giving away a complete BI Stack for free while charging $25,000 per processor for the SQL Server 2005 Enterprise database means they are well above the prevailing low price in the market;
8)They have a permanent Texas Presidential pardon;
7)In the Antitrust trial Microsoft appeared to succeed in getting the notion that they could put anything they wanted in the operating system, including a kitchen sink, without raising antitrust considerations … uuuhhh past the judge and courts. So why not add databases to the list of software that can have kitchen sinks added to their core in an orgy of bungling … uhhh bundling;
6)They have a permanent Texas Presidential pardon;
5)Look IBM and Oracle are sort of half-assed doing the same thing with a bunch of shlocky free BI giveaways too;
4)They have a permanent Texas Presidential pardon;
3)They have even better than a Texas Presidential pardon – Gartner Group is saying the market needs consolidation – and so consolidation there will be;
2)They have a permanent Texas Presidential pardon;
1)They have even better yet again than a Gartner and permanent Texas Presidential pardon; Bill Saint Gates has a Papal Dispensation for all his other free giveaways.
So begone you BI country bumpkin – I never want to hear from you again.”
(c)JBSurveyer 2005