Suddenly Microsoft software doesn't seem like a very good value for colleges and universities. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Microsoft has just killed its concurrent-use licensing policy, moving entirely to a per-computer licensing system. That change effectively prices Microsoft software well out of reach for use in many academic settings.

Under the old plan, a college could purchase fifty copies of Visual Basic, install them on a central server, and make the software available from any computer on the network. Even if there were a thousand computers that had access to that server, any of those computers could run Visual Basic-- as long as no more than fifty of them used it at once. This flexibility allowed students to do their work in the classrooms, in computer labs, from their networked dorm rooms, etc. without requiring a separate license for every system. But now, that same school is expected to purchase a thousand licenses--one for every computer--in order to allow the software to be run on any machine. The other option is to buy fifty licensed copies and require students who need to run that software to use only those fifty licensed machines. No more working in your room, no more stopping in at the closest cluster to get some work done-- if the Visual Basic lab is on the other side of campus, oh well.

Sounds like Microsoft still isn't thinking in terms of distributed networked environments. To them, each computer is a PC; to the colleges, each computer is a terminal, and it doesn't matter which one a given person uses at a given time. Their attitude was clear at a meeting of college computing officials. When Aleisa Spain, Microsoft's director of higher-education marketing, said "You basically know what computers will run this software," the audience's response was, "No, we don't. This is a network."

Sounds a lot like Microsoft's attitude toward NC's.