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Microsoft Takes on Complex Software Licensing

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

There’s a tension between licensing flexibility and complexity. While having a license that is customized to your particular business and needs is nice, the benefits of customization get lost when complexity starts to mount.

This is nowhere more true than with Microsoft (News - Alert) and its plethora of software products. The company is notorious for lengthy and complex licensing schemes, especially for large enterprises. This stems, in part at least, from the fine-grained licensing options available through Microsoft.

With options comes complexity, however, and Microsoft finally has gotten the memo that its licensing options are far too complex.

Recently Microsoft’s new-ish CEO, Satya Nadella (News - Alert), announced at the Redmond software giant would be simplifying its licensing schemes. The crowd cheered on the news, perhaps one of only a few times in history that an auditorium full of people has cheered over a licensing announcement.

“We’re trying to simplify the business processes around our licensing, which is something we’ve had requests from our customers for a while,” said Microsoft CIO Jim DuBois in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Microsoft will be rolling out a “radical simplification” of documentation, language and terms to volume licensing systems, according to DuBois. It also will offer a set of online customer portals that CIOs can access to purchase rights to the company’s many products.

The Microsoft Products and Services Agreement, the document that defines the total amount and cost of software that CIOs purchase, will reportedly be pared down from 250 pages to eight.

That’s a huge cut in documentation, which highlights the vast simplification that Microsoft is pursuing.

Nadella has already shown a willingness to change longstanding Microsoft practices, a habit that has earned the company plaudits and newfound respect from customers on the cusp of leaving the company for cloud-based competition. The simplification of licensing is just another example of the positive direction since Nadella took charge.

Licensing needs to be fair, but it doesn’t have to be voluminous. Keep it simple and straightforward. The balance between flexibility and complexity must be constantly reassessed.