Once upon a time you were allowed to decide what you pay and what you get. This seems to be a fairytale if we look at the beginning. Well, it isn’t. Reality and fairytales are like water and fire. They don’t go to well together. Sometimes, however, we have that childish dream that one of these nicer fairytales – not all of them are that super nice, as we are well aware of – would come true.
No Fairytales – Use Microsoft Apps!
But, anyway(s): There was a time when you bought MS Word you did not get MS PowerPoint, and MS Excel with it. You as a dear customer had a choice. You could use IBM Freelance instead of PowerPoint and IBM Lotus 123 instead of Exchange. And you didn’t get MS Outlook installed if you used IBM Notes as your email client. Yes, guys, we were wild and free! Now we don’t get what we want, but what we deserve.
We could continue with other products Microsoft is so proud of that we get them although we possibly don’t wish to use them. We can’t buy things separately. There are license bundles and that’s it (mostly, with certain smaller deviations from that rule). You will find those deviations very expensive. They come over you if you want to get your mobile device a little more secure. We’ll talk about that separately. And be assured this will wipe all laughing out of your face for a certain amount of time.
No Fairytales – Use Microsoft Apps!
The real pain the ass hits you when you want to use Microsoft Office365 Apps on your mobile devices. In this case you need to have MS Intune even if you do not wish to use it as your solution to manage your mobile fleet. There is no way avoiding implementing Intune in that case. Secondly Microsoft has stopped two other initiatives to get you mobiles containerized: they, firstly, don’t allow to use a wrapper for theirs apps, and, secondly, they don’t let EMM vendors to secure the MS Office and other MS apps with their SDKs anymore – even if those vendors would shoulder the expenses for such an effort (both they did allow until October 2018!).
The logic behind all that isn’t a technical one. All other vendors don’t force customers to use a piece of software you don’t need otherwise with a feature set that has nothing to do with licensing at all just because they hook up on it to do their license management with it. Therefore the reason for that must be a commercial one. It’s a no-brainer to unveil what the hidden agenda behind that move would be.
That leads to the final question of the day: Do you like to pay for your Vendor’s License Management? Yes? Use Microsoft Apps!
To contact me with your concerns regarding what you just read please email here: business.ethics@systag.com
