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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Is Intel exceptionally unsuccessful as an architecture designer?
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2024 09:27:58 +0200
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On 18/09/2024 22:57, Brett wrote:
> David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:
>> On 18/09/2024 02:42, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>> On Wed, 18 Sep 2024 02:54:51 +0300, Michael S wrote:
>>>
>>>> There are few things Intel would wish more than to "suffer"
>>>> financially like Microsoft.
>>>
>>> It is true that Microsoft is not (yet) losing money, but still the
>>> revenues from its Windows cash cow cannot be what they used to be, if you
>>> look at the declining level of investment Microsoft is putting back into
>>> its flagship OS.
>>>
>>
>> I think MS has long ago stopped viewing desktop Windows as a cash cow.
>> But it still gets in a lot of money from server versions, as well as
>> server software such as MS SQL server.  (The client access licences for
>> these cost far more than Windows desktop ever did.)
> 
> There are lots of free SQL servers now, this has forced Microsoft to make
> MS SQL Express free for smaller than enterprise editions.
> 
> https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=101064
> 
> https://josipmisko.com/posts/sql-express-limitations#
> 
> Those limits dwarf our needs.

We have just recently had to buy a Windows server and MS SQL server 
license, in order to run a third-party application that insists those 
are the requirements and they won't support the use of SQL Express.  The 
server hardware cost about $1200 (my price estimates here are very 
rough) for a mini PC with 64 GB ram, running Proxmox.  Windows server 
license was about $1000, and SQL Server was $1200, and there was the 
same again for the CALs needed.  So something like 75% of the cost of 
the box is license fees to Microsoft - and that was as cheap as we could 
get within the requirements of the third-party application.  That same 
application could have been written in a few thousand lines of Python 
and run on a Rasberry Pi with an external disk for storage.  MS make a 
lot of profit from being the "industry standard" and persuading 
specialist software developers that Windows and MS SQL server are the 
server platforms of choice.