VSTS Licensing

re: VSTS Licensing

Brendan Green — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 00:19:00 GMT

While that's all good and well for large(r) teams, what about the plethora of independant consultants / micro ISVs / one-man-shops? The changes to the MSDN Subscriptions (especially Universal) are worrying to me. Are you keeping up with this: <a target="_new" href="http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackId=2b58b8db-5bba-4dfc-be10-78ad43686b3b">http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackId=2b58b8db-5bba-4dfc-be10-78ad43686b3b</a> What are your opinions?

re: VSTS Licensing

Eric Bowen — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 02:09:00 GMT

Hi Rick- I think you guys are missing the boat, here's why, and some constructive suggestion on how to fix the problem: <a target="_new" href="http://scrappydog.com/blog/archive/2005/03/22/1485.aspx">http://scrappydog.com/blog/archive/2005/03/22/1485.aspx</a> Cheers- -EAB

re: VSTS Licensing

Eric Bowen — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 02:40:00 GMT

Here are my simple recommendations: 1. Abandon the idea of seperate Tester/Developer/Architect versions of the product. Merge all the functionality in to one Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition product, and be done with it. There are lots of benefits here, and no real downside. You don't really expect many of us to buy the whole Team Suite anyway, so it's not going mean a significant loss of revenue. You get rid of 2 SKU's which probably saves more money than you were going to make on them anyway. You generate a significant good press about a rich full featured product, instead of the current storm of ill will about a collection of confusing expensive products. 2. Make Team Foundation Server free. The current pricing is basically a penalty for small shops, and it's a minor expense to the big IT organizations, but it prevents the smaller consultants and ISV's from becoming familar with the product, and recommending it to their larger clients. You're making the money on the individual desktops. Give away the server, and drive desktop sales. 3. (As and alternative to #2) Include a single user version of Team Foundation Server on MSDN. This simple change will most of us a lot happier, cost almost nothing, and it's consitent with how other server products like BizTalk and SQL Server Enterprise Edition are delivered.

re: VSTS Licensing

Don — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 03:03:00 GMT

Rick wrote: "Check the competition, do the research and then come back and buy it because you can’t touch the price for a supported integrated, enterprise ready product." I'm afraid I've already done that resarch and made that purchase. Yesterday, when the pricing plan was announced and it became clear that the VSTS team hasn't listened to anything that the small developer community has been saying for the past year, I bought FogBugz. I had been holding off on purchasing a defect tracking system because I wanted to go with an integrated VSTS solution. That plan is out the window now. Ditto for test case management. I had been planning on going with an integrated VSTS solution. For that price, I can live with NUnit. And as for a source control system, I couldn't have said it better myself "we don’t pay SourceSafe licenses because we get them in MSDN." I'm a real customer. These are real decisions I've made in the past 24 hours as a result of your pricing announcements. I love the VSTS feature set, but whoever told you that more than doubling the cost of equiping my dev team was no big deal should be fired on the spot. The devs built a great product and then the PM's f*cked it up by not listening to what customers have been saying for the past year. I'm glad you're excited about your pricing announcements. It's too bad the people you thought were going to be your customers don't share your enthusiasm. -Don

VS 2005 Pricing and LicensingL

Dennis' blog — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 08:15:00 GMT

VS 2005 Pricing and Licensing

Dennis' blog — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 08:16:00 GMT

re: VSTS Licensing

ZippyV — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 09:23:00 GMT

It's not because you add 3 features to a product that you have to raise the price with a power of 3. Those prices are exagerated even if one competitor has put a higher price on his product. Up to yesterday, I tought I would be able to settle with an MSDN Universal subscription that provides me everything I need. But when I look at the prices that were announced today, I don't see myself buying any of those subscriptions. 11.000 $ for a product that is still not complete? I don't think so. With such a move Microsoft isn't attracting developers to it's platform. If Microsoft continues to raise the prices of their other products too(Windows & Office) then we will see a platform movement sooner than later and I'm the very last one to say something like this.

re: VSTS Licensing

denny — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 13:30:00 GMT

Rick, Please see if you or someone can address an issue that is key for a lot of us: the "Team of one" many of us have been very impressed with the inital signs of what VSTS might do for us, but we are not even at the 5 user stage. so for example I'd love to be able to keep my MSDN sub going and upgrade to Team Tools as a single seat. I'll go the bill for a "mini server" to store my code and log my stuff etc.... but I would have a very small cycle and only on occasion would I contract out any work. I have some ideas for how this could work for MS if you wanted to contact me off line; I do see that MS needs to make good decisions and perhaps the Team Suite is not for every consultant. just drop a line to denny at figuerres dot com if you want to get more feedback and some ideas ...

re: VSTS Licensing

Anon — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 14:43:00 GMT

Since I can't for the life of me figure out what roles the people on this team play (it depends on what project they are on, what resources were available when it started, etc), you actually are increasing the cost by $3,000 for the server, and ~$6,000 for each developer per year. Will the people on product teams at MS be using a role-based product? And that's at one of the few places that actually have clearly defined roles. I think we'll go with the solution we have - it's not nearly as full featured, but it requires no change to our processes, no conversion of our source repositories, and will save us $3,000 + $36,000/year. For that, i'll hire an intern to run around and ask people for status and input it himself - and I'll still save money.

re: VSTS Licensing

David — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 15:41:00 GMT

I am very disappointed about the pricing, simply because I would have liked to use some of the TS versions and know now that I can't. At the same time things like that happen all the time, there are many things I would like to have but can't afford. I still wonder whether this is a smart move on Microsoft's part. Here are some predictions what will happen from me. I am not a very experienced industry guy, so I might be completly off ;) 1. Talk about TS in the blogosphere/newsgroups will decrease sharply. The hype that surrounded the TS SKU will end with this day. The blogsphere will once again turn their attention towards the NSuite and how that can be used successfully. Consequently that set of tools will improve faster, since I expect more people to be willing to invest in their development. 2. VS 2005 will NOT bring any improvement in terms of software development processes to the vast majority of developers. It follows that most Windows software will stay as crappy as it is today ;) 3. The agile community will not embrace MS and its products as major players. I might be wrong with this, but my impression is that the anounced pricing and the general spirit of proponents of the agile movevment will not align. 4. TS was anounced as a platform for software development tools. I remember talk about a flurishing eco system of ISV that would build plug ins, DSLs etc for the TS platform. Forget that. Small, innovative vendors that have a pathbraking software development tool will sell that either as a standalone product or as a plugin for some other platform. No one is going to be so crazy to limit the market for such tools to TS users. 5. I am working in the academic, scientific world. This whole area is already not very interested in Microsoft's offerings. TS is not going to change anything about that. It will probably also not worsen the situation, but I believe that MS is missing an opportunity here to become interesting for a new market. We'll see how things work out :)

re: VSTS Licensing

john — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 16:02:00 GMT

But if I'm an independant consultant or a small ISV with only two or three people, then I'm hosed? It still seems to me that using something like SourceGear Vault would be cheaper for small shops. Then when I do spin up on a larger project where Team Systems doesn't seem so costly in comparison, how can you possibly expect me to recommend it if I've had no exposure to it? I may be wrong, but I think cutting out the little guy like this will end up hurting Microsoft in the end. Please help me understand if I'm wrong. But don't throw out numbers about five and ten person shops. Let's hear about the cost analysis for one and two person shops.

Microsoft responds (and still doesn't get it)

Eric Bowen's .NET Technology Blog — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 18:31:00 GMT

re: VSTS Licensing

Tim Hall — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 17:54:00 GMT

Dang, i was looking forward to using VSTS as well, looks like its sticking with sourcegear vault (not that thats a bad thing, vault is a very nice SCC) but i was looking forward to the non SCC componets of TS. I know TS is good but it ain't that good i have much better things to spend the companies money on. You might get uberlarge companies buying it but to me and i daresay most of your Visual Studio users its a blatent ripoff (made clear by the fact microsoft used the word simplifies in the press release, that always means more complex and expensive.

Nice post from VSTS head honcho....

Alex Lowe — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 06:16:00 GMT

Rick L. (VSTS Head Honcho) has a nice post that clears up my concerns about disclosing the foundation...

Scoring the Visual Studio 2005 pricing and packaging debate: Everybody's a little bit right.

Eric Bowen's .NET Technology Blog — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 06:20:00 GMT

Scoring the Visual Studio 2005 pricing and packaging debate: Everybody's a little bit right.

Eric Bowen's .NET Technology Blog — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 06:30:00 GMT

Team System: wading through the blogosphere comments....

Alex Lowe — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 07:12:00 GMT

Microsoft set out on a track to build lifecycle tools support for large enterprise teams (let's say 10+...

VSTS pricing announced

Buck Hodges — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 19:44:00 GMT

re: VSTS Licensing

Shawn Weitzel — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 18:21:00 GMT

One of the first things I'd like to see now that you've released the licensing info is a price comparision matrix vs clearcase/clearquest/mercury for generally equivalant licenses. I suspect a side by side comparision of licensing costs will help with some of the suprise that the community has expressed. Eric Sink's post touches on this indirectly when he talks about the target market, but I believe many of the developers generating negative "buzz" over price are most likely not familiar with the licensing costs of the competition.

re: VSTS Licensing

Joe — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 18:57:00 GMT

Wow. Not a lot of incentive to move from CVS/SVN, NUnit and CC.Net is there? Joe

re: VSTS Licensing

Vasu G — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 18:06:00 GMT

I think there is confusion as to what one gets with Team Foundation Server with all the pricing debate. Do we still have all the other functionality like writing unit tests, generating web tests, collabaration for bug tracking, requirements tracking etc. If SourceSafe is used as SCM tool, how is it different from having the server? Is the repository in SQL for SourceSafe in 2005? If this is all clarified somewhere, please give a pointer to the link. thanks

re: VSTS Licensing

Curious — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 14:30:00 GMT

Are there any further costs for meeting the SQL Server, SharePoint and Windows Server requirements for using VSTS?

re: VSTS Licensing

Erik — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 06:48:00 GMT

Here's the part nobody is talking about. If we stay at the current price level (don't transition to a VSTS license) then we LOSE features. We no longer get an enterprise development suite, we no longer get VSS licenses. We no longer get a lot of stuff, yet we PAY THE SAME AMOUNT. I'm talking about a VS Pro sub with an MSDN Premium sub. This whole Team System debacle is a ruse to cover up the fact that they're reducing the features of the MSDN Universal but making you pay the same price. What's more, adding new seats moving forward, even if we do transition to a VSTS sub means paying a much higher price than we currently pay. I suggest that if you plan for the VS Pro with MSDN Premium to replace the MSDN Universal, it should at least contain the same benefits, not reduced ones. By the way, the argument that servers have never been included with MSDN is BS. Ssince VS TFS *IS* a developer product, thus by it's very nature it *IS* a developer version. In the past, we received licenses to *ALL* developer products, including developer versions of server software (SQL Developer, for instance). Further, we got "production" versions of some software because it was used in development by many, such as Office and VS itself. Just because "production" means "for development" in the case of TFS doesn't make it an exception based on previous MSDN policies.

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