MSDN Pricing
-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Katsabaris
Sent: Friday, 12 November 2004 3:49 PM
Subject: RE: [aus-dotnet] MSDN Pricing
Dear Developer and Partner Community
I have been watching this email string with interest and would like to thank those that have provided feedback.
I feel it only fair to start by explaining some of the reasons for price discrepancy between the US and Australia and New Zealand:
1. Exchange Rates - are reviewed quarterly by MS and the necessary adjustments are made to local pricing accordingly. However, this in general would only account for approximately a 5-10% price difference due to time lag. As a side note, typically, global software companies add a premium of between 30-50% for selling software outside the US. Microsoft does not.
2. Microsoft can only suggest Recommended Retail Price. The ultimate price that our re-sellers charge is outside of MS control. The price at which MS sells to its re-sellers in the US is lineball to the price that it sells to re-sellers in Australia (barring exchange rates). The volume of software sales in the US market is massive compared to the Australian and New Zealand markets. Some re-sellers in the US will actually sell some products at a loss/or no margin i.e. MSDN, in order to capture other software sales i.e. Windows Server 2003. Unfortunately in our smaller markets these models do not work, and thankfully so for our local re-seller communities, as they are already under significant margin pressure.
Having said all this, the developer tools product team in Australia have taken on board some of the feedback you have provided us with over the last 12 months and made important changes to our local MSDN licensing.
The most pertinent of these for our developer community is the following:
* prior to the key change our local MSDN customers were required to meet certain volume hurdles in order to purchase via the more aggressive Open Licensing program. As an example, if you purchased an individual MSDN Universal license you would have to do so via our FPP licensing program and at a cost of approx $5,000 for a 12 month subscription;
* we recently made a change to our licensing that allows for even an individual copy of MSDN to qualify for Open Licensing. This change was made 5 months ago in a hope to improve the MSDN pricing acceptance within the Australian developer market.
An example of the new MSDN Open Licensing offer at work:
* MSDN Universal - License and Software Assurance - 2 year subscription - via Open Licensing - RRP $5,081. This equates to $2,540 per annum and delivers a 50% saving on the existing FPP List Price MSDN Universal.
We are in the final stages of launching a campaign that is designed to inform our developers of the fact that individual MSDN licenses are eligible to be purchased via the Open Licensing program.
In the mean time, if you wish to purchase MSDN via Open, simply ask your preferred re-seller to reference their Product List. The Product List clearly highlights that MSDN now counts as five licenses for the Open Licensing Program.
All customers are now eligible, and have been for 5 months, to purchase their MSDN licenses via Open.
If you require any further details regarding MSDN please feel free to contact me.
Thank you once more for your energetic responses.
Regards
Tony Katsabaris
Business Development Manager
Developer & Platform Strategy Group
Microsoft Australia