Registration-Free AD Cmdlets
In Dmitry’s PowerBlog, he said that one of the biggest complaints they got about their FREE AD Cmdlets was that you had to register to download them. Now you can download them directly without having to register. I must say that I’ve got mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it reduces the friction associated with getting great a set of Cmdlets to the community and that is great. On the other hand, these Cmdlets are developed by Quest Software Corporation, not Quest Philanthropies. Being a commercial enterprise is a good thing. Being a corporation means that they bring in money which allows to them to hire bright creative programmers that do wonderful things like the AD Cmdlets and PowerGUI. The one thing I know about business is that in a deal, everyone needs to walk away feeling it was worth their while or it isn’t a stable deal. Quest is spending a lot of money having their employees develop these Cmdlets and making them available FOR FREE to the community. So the question then is, “What are they getting out of the deal?”. I assumed that the answer was marketing information. Now that the you don’t even need to register , the question again is, “What is Quest getting out of the deal?”. If the community pressures a vendor into a deal that they aren’t getting enough out of, it is not stable situation – the deal won’t stand. At some point, they’ll do an internal review and say that it doesn’t make sense and stop funding the effort. They’ll redeploy their developers, they’ll pull the SW so it doesn’t consume bandwidth, they won’t update things to the new release, etc, etc. And that is the point – everyone needs to walk away from a deal feeling it is worth their while. I hate registering just like everyone else. But let’s be honest with each other – at the end of the day it is a VERY tiny price to pay to get something as useful as Quest’s AD Cmdlets or their PowerGUI application (FOR FREE!). 3 cheers for Quest and their great efforts. Cheers. Jeffrey Snover [MSFT] Windows Management Partner Architect Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx
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