Win8



  • @dhromed said:

    @Ronald said:

    Very convenient, that way you can work on your blog while keeping an eye on the pasta sauce and you know immediately when it's time to move clothes from the washer to the dryer, something you can do without interrupting your dinner.
     

    Unfortunately, I'm two rooms away from all kitchen goings-on.

    My mistake, when you said you had a "work space" in the kitchen I thought you meant a desk, but I guess instead you were talking about that area where you prepare rotten liver sausage or whatever other sticky or slimy food (aka "European Cuisine").



  • @OzPeter said:

    The county I live in also has laws against using furniture intended for indoor use in the outdoors.

    What about cars with no wheels or rusty water-heaters? This could not be forbidden in the USA because that's a cultural bridge connecting rednecks and tacos people.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Ronald said:

    rotten liver sausage
    “Rotten” is saved for cheese.



  • I know from a good source — Assassin's Creed Ⅲ — that in the US people used to leave their clothes out to dry in the snow.



  • @Zecc said:

    I know from a good source — Assassin's Creed Ⅲ — that in the US people used to leave their clothes out to dry in the snow.
     

    I learned that their visual acuity is so terrible, that in winter they can't find a bulky man with a large hat who is crouched behind three twigs.



  • @dhromed said:

    I learned that their visual acuity is so terrible, that in winter they can't find a bulky man with a large hat who is crouched behind three twigs.
     



  • @Zecc said:

    @dhromed said:

    I learned that their visual acuity is so terrible, that in winter they can't find a bulky man with a large hat who is crouched behind three twigs.
     

     

    I have to be honest and state that in summer, the foliage is much denser and I can adequately suspend disbelief. You can't make it too dense. Sometimes I couldn't even see the guy myself, so that's a gameplay issue, you know?

     



  • @dhromed said:

    Sometimes I couldn't even see the guy myself, so that's a gameplay issue, you know?
    I have that problem mostly with trees while in a conflict. Then I have to fight both the guards and the camera. At least fighting in this version is so easy it's barely a challenge.

    The only real issue I have with this version of the game is the stupid TheDailyWTF-worthy crafting/trading interface. Want to sell 24 wolf pelts after that fun trip through Great Piece Hills? Have fun navigating the item selection menu 24 times.



  • @Zecc said:

    I have that problem mostly with trees while in a conflict. Then I have to fight both the guards and the camera.
     

    Oh, I didn't have that.

    @Zecc said:

    At least fighting in this version is so easy it's barely a challenge.

    Not sure. On one hand, if you don't pull the right moves with a heavy, he's gonna chop your ass up, but then again, I conquered most forts by walking in the front door and slaughtering everyone, then calmly hoisting the flag. Stealth was crap in III. Obviously I bought the black dye as early as possible, for the badass factor.

    @Zecc said:

    The only real issue I have with this version of the game is the stupid TheDailyWTF-worthy crafting/trading interface. Want to sell 24 wolf pelts after that fun trip through Great Piece Hills? Have fun navigating the item selection menu 24 times.

    Yes. The UI is the shittiest shit that ever shat a shit.

    The story is shit too. And performance is shit. It wasn't terribly good overall. At least Haytham was an interesting character.

     



  • @dhromed said:

    At least Haytham was an interesting character.
    I haven't finished the game yet, so I don't know the full story yet.

    But I can say this: I don't love him, but I don't hate' im either!



  • @Zecc said:

    I haven't finished the game yet, so I don't know the full story yet.
     

    I will not spoil.



  • In Windows 7, there was an option to change the title bar text colour as well as the title bar colour. Thus, for example, if you changed your title bar colour to black, you would change the text colour to white so the title text would be readable. This was because Windows 7 wasn't clever enough to figure out that "hey, the title bar colour is dark, so I should change the title bar text colour to something light so the user can still read the text".

    In Windows 8, you can still change the title bar colour, but no longer the text colour. Windows 8 also (still) isn't clever enough to automatically change the title text colour. The result is that if you change your title bar colour to black, you get black title text on black title bar, which is totally unreadable. And the only way to rectify this is to install a third-party theming application.

    What. The fuck. Was Microsoft. Thinking?

    Changing colours is one of the simplest use-cases for an OS. How the hell did Microsoft not test this? How the hell did they let this get into production? How the hell, after a Service Pack, is this still not fucking fixed?

    This is the kind of stupid bullshit I'd expect from KDE or Gnome, but I'd be willing to give those a bit more leeway because I don't expect that level of quality from them. But not only has Microsoft managed to regress in features from Win7 to Win8, they also have the gall to charge good money for doing so.

    I don't think I've ever been as angry at a software company as I am right now. If Windows 9 isn't decent, I just might have to start buying Apple products. Get your fucking shit together Microsoft, stop forcing your Metro crap on everything, and concentrate on making your OS not shit.



  • @The_Assimilator said:

    What. The fuck. Was Microsoft. Thinking?

    Wait, Windows 7 had an option to change title bar colour? I never found it; I always figured that, with a black title bar, you were stuck with black text surrounded by a murky grey glow that just looked like someone had carved its name into stale jizz.

    In 8, I'm using UxStyle, which is a noninvasive procedure (runs as a service and make no system modifications) along with a theme that does only two things: a) white title bar captions, and b) sets the border and caption of inactive windows to a darker shade of the active colours instead of the helpful¹ but unattractive grey. Works a charm.

    (The real WTF is that Server 2012 still has some hideous prelease theme with senseless black borders everywhere, which looks horrible for terminal server users.)

    ¹In Windows 7, for me anyway, it's not obvious whether the topmost window is focused or not (i.e. has the focus gone into a black hole again), but that may just be me.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Wait, Windows 7 had an option to change title bar colour?




    Clicking the title bar in either of the active title bars or the inactive title bar changes the 'item' being edited.



  • @PJH said:

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    Wait, Windows 7 had an option to change title bar colour?

    Clicking the title bar in either of the active title bars or the inactive title bar changes the 'item' being edited.

    I don't have an 8.1 system here to check, but a quick Google finds an MS help article which claims the same is true for 8.1 as for 7. I'm guessing the Assimilator didn't notice the font bit below the 'Item:' dropdown, and instead was looking through the dropdown for an item called 'title bar text colour' or some such.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @TDWTF123 said:

    @PJH said:
    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    Wait, Windows 7 had an option to change title bar colour?

    Clicking the title bar in either of the active title bars or the inactive title bar changes the 'item' being edited.

    I don't have an 8.1 system here to check, but a quick Google finds an MS help article which claims the same is true for 8.1 as for 7. I'm guessing the Assimilator didn't notice the font bit below the 'Item:' dropdown, and instead was looking through the dropdown for an item called 'title bar text colour' or some such.
    Googling images for [windows 8.1 "window color and appearance"] is showing quite a few akin to the following (without a title-bar-text-color option,) which appears to be a completely different dialog - perhaps the 'old-style' has been removed/hidden away?





  • @PJH said:

    Clicking the title bar in either of the active title bars or the inactive title bar changes the 'item' being edited.

    Well I never … I am familiar with that panel (and with altering the Registry settings to achieve effects not possible using the UI), but I was certain that the title bar colour did nothing in Aero Glass and Aero Basic, but I've just confirmed that it works in both. Now the caption looks like you've jizzed the text into stale jizz.

    Windows 8's UI has the cleanliness of the classic theme but without the depressingly dated look (though moving away from the horrible default beige shade helps enormously). The window shadow does need dialling up a little — they've taken it too far the other way now :)



  • @PJH said:

    So far as I know, Windows 8 only permits changing the caption colour in the high contrast schemes. For no reason (hence the WTF) you are banned from altering the caption colour otherwise, despite using one single theme again!



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    the depressingly dated look [of classic]
     

    Simply picking any other color for the flat surfaces removes the weird "specular highlight" lines and flattens the UI very agreeably.

    But that's moot because I left XP a year ago.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    So far as I know, Windows 8 only permits changing the caption colour in the high contrast schemes. For no reason (hence the WTF) you are banned from altering the caption colour otherwise, despite using one single theme again!

    Liar! Microsoft uses STATISTICS to figure out what users need. So we can all rest easy knowing it's right. Because statistics never lie. Just like me.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    So far as I know, Windows 8 only permits changing the caption colour in the high contrast schemes. For no reason (hence the WTF) you are banned from altering the caption colour otherwise, despite using one single theme again!
     

    I have not seen anything alike the good ol' advanced colors in 8.0.

    I had to hit up the registry to change the intolerable selection color, which is promptly forgotten when the computer resumes from standby (did I change it in the wrong registry root?)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dhromed said:

    But that's moot because I left XP a year ago.
    I only left it this week due to being forced to 'upgrade' to Office 2013 which refused to install on it. (I only use Windows in a VM for interdepartmental paperwork.)



  • @The_Assimilator said:

    How the hell, after a Service Pack, is this still not fucking fixed?
    Switch to any of the high-contrast themes, then you'll be able to set the colours almost like the Classic theme in Win<=7 allowed you to:
    Custom Windows 8 theme
    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    (The real WTF is that Server 2012 still has some hideous prelease theme with senseless black borders everywhere, which looks horrible for terminal server users.)
    You're supposed to install the Desktop Experience feature on a terminal server.



  • @ender said:

    You're supposed to install the Desktop Experience feature on a terminal server.

    That's Microsoft's enterprisey Black Line Removal module? ;-)

    (Honestly I have no idea what I am not "experiencing" other than having stupid colours. I still get all the animation and what not. I can live without having a see-through taskbar. It's not like there's a lot to experience in Windows 8, except lunacy.)



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    That's Microsoft's enterprisey Black Line Removal module? ;-)
    On Server 2008 and 2008 R2 that allowed you to enable Aero theme through remote desktop (but only if you were connecting from Vista to 2008, or from 7 to 2008 R2 - any other combination won't work). On 2012 it gives you back the UI to set the colours (you can try hacking the Registry, but for some reason, the colours reset to default at random times).



  • @ender said:

    On 2012 it gives you back the UI to set the colours (you can try hacking the Registry, but for some reason, the colours reset to default at random times).

    Does it also stop the Start screen from offering everyone Server Manager and the like by default, and pinning Server Manager and PowerShell to the taskbar? ;-)



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Does it also stop the Start screen from offering everyone Server Manager and the like by default, and pinning Server Manager and PowerShell to the taskbar? ;-)
    Nope, you have to remove those by settings permissions through Group Policy.



  • @ender said:

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    Does it also stop the Start screen from offering everyone Server Manager and the like by default, and pinning Server Manager and PowerShell to the taskbar? ;-)
    Nope, you have to remove those by settings permissions through Group Policy.

    I think I might be a happier person if I just started smoking whatever it is that Microsoft are smoking.

    Another gotcha with Windows 8 is that, after installation, it ties up the Trusted Installer (?) service for some sort of background optimisation (maybe it's removing all the rubbish it should never have installed in the first place). This means that if you want to put a computer on an SBS 2007 domain, the attempt to enable .NET 2–3.5 (required for the connection wizard) times out repeatedly because it can't get any sense out of Trusted Installer, which isn't remotely interested in doing any work for the interactive user. On a poor old computer, this can go on for many hours of CPU grinding. Even on a relatively fast computer, when you simply want to get it up-to-date after installation, Windows Update stares blankly for half an hour or more, unable to get past 0% downloaded thanks to this optimisation.

    Talking about colours, the one thing I personally hate is that the scroll bar track, and scroll bar thumb are virtually the same colour in Windows 8. Against a white window background, it's OK for me, but against a black window background (e.g. websites) the contrast effect on the eye makes it impossible for me to actually see the thumb outside of my centre of vision, and I end up clicking the wrong part of the scroll bar before realising that the thumb is nowhere near where I thought it was. This is a persistent inanity at MS that was only rectifiable in XP in Mozilla applications by setting the track colour to something bright — this Windows 3 setting is ignored by the Windows native API but is "mistakenly" obeyed by XUL.

    Apple have had the good sense (from Mac OS 8 onwards, anyway) to paint the thumb in a highly contrasting colour so that you can actually see the stupid thing without having to revert to some hideous high contrast theme! XP Luna and Vista/7 were an improvement (and for me personally they were OK as I have good vision), but 8 has given up and ruined it. At least in Firefox there might be a XUL CSS trick to change the colours … I need to investigate that.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Another gotcha with Windows 8 is that, after installation, it ties up the Trusted Installer (?) service for some sort of background optimisation (maybe it's removing all the rubbish it should never have installed in the first place). This means that if you want to put a computer on an SBS 2007 domain, the attempt to enable .NET 2–3.5 (required for the connection wizard) times out repeatedly because it can't get any sense out of Trusted Installer, which isn't remotely interested in doing any work for the interactive user.
    Huh? I upgraded several older machines to Windows 8 when it was available for 30€, and never had any such problems. I'm not sure what connection wizard you're talking about (I added the machines to SBS domain simply through Win+X > System > Change Settings), but I did have to enable .NET 3.5 on all those machines pretty much immediately after install, and the only problem I had with that was that you either have to do it before adding the computer to domain (so the files are downloaded off Windows Update), or have the domain set up with install source for .NET (because it tries to download the files from WSUS, and if that isn't set up, it simply fails instead of offering to check Windows Update directly; additional problem here is that the group policy templates for this don't work with Server/SBS 2008, so you have to install RSAT on a Windows 8 machine).
    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    Talking about colours, the one thing I personally hate is that the scroll bar track, and scroll bar thumb are virtually the same colour in Windows 8.
    In High Contrast mode, they are exactly the same (except for Internet Explorer, which draws them in a completely different style for some reason). Not much of a problem for me though, since I very rarely actually use scrollbars - I either use mousewheel, or PgUp/PgDn keys.

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Apple have had the good sense (from Mac OS 8 onwards, anyway) to paint the thumb in a highly contrasting colour so that you can actually see the stupid thing without having to revert to some hideous high contrast theme!
    Don't the latest OS X versions hide the scrollbar completely until you move the mouse near the edge?



  • @ender said:

    Huh? I upgraded several older machines to Windows 8 when it was available for 30€, and never had any such problems.

    I've never upgraded from 7 to 8 — maybe that sidesteps it as the optimisation is already taken care of.

    @ender said:

    I'm not sure what connection wizard you're talking about (I added the machines to SBS domain simply through Win+X > System > Change Settings) …

    You're supposed to always use the wizards in SBS, otherwise (allegedly) you'll make a mess out of it — it's built around a premise that everything depends on specific configurations that the wizards ensure. However, most of the time, anything you want to do isn't covered by a wizard (removal of machines from a domain, mail aliases and redirection, pretty much anything really) and you can waste hours trying to find some seemingly nonexistent wizard to avoid the risk of breaking the system by not doing things the "correct" way, before deciding to do it the "hard" way.

    To join a computer to an SBS domain, there's a client-side wizard that you run from (in 2008¹/2011) http://connect/ (previously http://%domaincontroller%/connectcomputer I think) and this requires .NET 2–3.5 be installed or enabled, which you can't do for hours while the OS is optimising stuff and Turn Windows features on or off times out on everything you try to do.

    I am actually glad SBS is dead. I should never have existed, and it's another testament to Microsoft's clueless idea of small businesses. In 2008 and 2011, you are actually banned from having users without mailboxes. Even companies of only a few people can have quite complex requirements that are stymied by SBS's ridiculously short-sighted design. Having wizards isn't a bad thing (being able to remotely enable Routing and Remote Access is a nice idea, except for when SBS screws up and locks you out anyway) but there's a difference between handy wizards and being expected to be wholly reliant on a Fisher Price UI just to get a price that's anywhere close to fair for a small business.

    @ender said:

    Don't the latest OS X versions hide the scrollbar completely until you move the mouse near the edge?

    Can't you just turn them back on if you need? I never liked the idea — I was so glad when I moved from Photoshop 5 to 6 and finally had proportional scrollbars and I could figure out how fast and how far I needed to scroll to navigate around an image.

    In my case, it's only Firefox where this is an issue, and I've figured out how to change the colours, only now I've made the thumbs too garish ;-)

    ¹ I meant 2008 not 2007 earlier — too many arbitrary years to remember. 2008 has Exchange 2010, and 2011 has Exchange 2010 …



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    I've never upgraded from 7 to 8 — maybe that sidesteps it as the optimisation is already taken care of.
    When I said "upgrade", I actually meant (almost) clean install - the machines were originally running XP or Vista, and you can't do an upgrade from those (but you have to leave the original OS on disk, otherwise Windows 8 wouldn't want to activate - it just moves the old Program Files, Documents and Settings and Windows directories to Windows.old during install).
    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    You're supposed to always use the wizards in SBS, otherwise (allegedly) you'll make a mess out of it — it's built around a premise that everything depends on specific configurations that the wizards ensure. However, most of the time, anything you want to do isn't covered by a wizard (removal of machines from a domain, mail aliases and redirection, pretty much anything really) and you can waste hours trying to find some seemingly nonexistent wizard to avoid the risk of breaking the system by not doing things the "correct" way, before deciding to do it the "hard" way.
    I'm aware of the wizards, and they seem to break if you look at them funnily (also, I hate that the user creation wizards neither let you paste passwords in, nor let you import user lists from external sources - eg. a CSV text file).
    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    To join a computer to an SBS domain, there's a client-side wizard that you run from (in 2008¹/2011) http://connect/ (previously http://%domaincontroller%/connectcomputer I think) and this requires .NET 2–3.5 be installed or enabled, which you can't do for hours while the OS is optimising stuff and Turn Windows features on or off times out on everything you try to do.
    I didn't know of this one at all. But I never had any troubles enabling .NET 3.5 after fresh install, except when I joined the computer to domain before setting up that domain for allowing .NET 3.5 install on Win8 first.
    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    I am actually glad SBS is dead. I should never have existed, and it's another testament to Microsoft's clueless idea of small businesses.
    I'm not - Exchange on it's own costs more than SBS, and due to privacy concerns I doubt many people would move to cloud-based solutions. Not to mention SQL server.
    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    In 2008 and 2011, you are actually banned from having users without mailboxes.
    Only if you use the SBS Console. Which is too slow to use for anything serious anyway.
    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    Can't you just turn them back on if you need?
    I'm not sure actually - I don't own a Mac, and I don't go around changing UI preferences on clients' computers.
    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    I meant 2008 not 2007 earlier
    I imagined that.
    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    2008 has Exchange 2010, and 2011 has Exchange 2010 …
    2008 has Exchange 2007 :)



  • Yeah, the password pasting restriction is quite bizarre. Must be designed by people who haven't figured out that copying and pasting saves a lot of grief with mistyped passwords, usernames, and e-mail addresses (including getting the domain name wrong). Which is ironic considering that the one thing that bad developers are most infamous for is copying and pasting code!

    My problem is that SBS is targeted towards letting small businesses run their own IT, by allowing people who have no idea what they're doing near Windows Server, which is an insane idea. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't allow small businesses to licence the components (Server, Exchange, SQL Server) with same CAL restrictions, for the same price, but leave out the Fisher Price interface and the attendant ominous threats that you'll be doomed if you don't use the wizards for everything. (And now of course there's Office 2013 and Live ID-based activation, especially considering the fact that volume licensing actually costs more money … what sort of a company has surcharges instead of discounts for bulk orders?)

    As for SBS Console, don't forget that it crashes frequently.

    I will get those numbers right eventually — tired :)



  • @ender said:

    Exchange on it's own costs more than SBS, and due to privacy concerns I doubt many people would move to cloud-based solutions. Not to mention SQL server.

    In 2013 alone I've helped four different clients who decided to move their email platform to Office365. The smallest had 14 users only, the biggest a little over 1100. Not only did most of them receive a green light from various security or legal departments, they were also very happy because the move was transparent (Microsoft makes it pretty easy to move things one mailbox at a time if needed).

    Of those 4 companies, three decided to host their public website on Azure, one on Sharepoint (Office365). Two also decided to deploy all their web applications, databases (Oracle and SQL) and internal VMs on Azure. And the feedback I always get from those companies is that Microsoft is faster to resolve Level 1 and Level 2 problems than their former in-house staff. This kind of support is included with Office365 but requires an extra fee on Azure.

    For a long time I was under the impression that the smaller a company is, the more they benefit from this kind of setup, but as we crunched the numbers and reviewed their business processes, even for the company with 1100 employees it was worth it.

    The most interesting case is a client who has about 75 employees. They bought new HP laptops to everyone and purchased the extra support deal; whenever a machine is broken they get a new laptop on-site the next day, and their service guy has access to a USB stick with all the required software. All the data is in the cloud (even "My Documents" is on Sky Drive) so they just wipe the old machine and start fresh with a new one. They fired their IT guys (they had 2) and cancelled all their support contracts with local leeches. And everyone can work from home when they carry their laptops with them, even if the head office has no power or internet connection for some reason.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ender said:

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    Apple have had the good sense (from Mac OS 8 onwards, anyway) to paint the thumb in a highly contrasting colour so that you can actually see the stupid thing without having to revert to some hideous high contrast theme!
    Don't the latest OS X versions hide the scrollbar completely until you move the mouse near the edge?
    They hide the scrollbar entirely unless you're scrolling (with a short timeout after you finish scrolling before it fades out). Works well if you're using a touchpad gesture or a mouse scrollwheel, and that's pretty much everyone these days. The benefit? That extra space for displaying content.



  • @Ronald said:

    For a long time I was under the impression that the smaller a company is, the more they benefit from this kind of setup, but as we crunched the numbers and reviewed their business processes, even for the company with 1100 employees it was worth it.

    The most interesting case is a client who has about 75 employees. They bought new HP laptops to everyone and purchased the extra support deal; whenever a machine is broken they get a new laptop on-site the next day, and their service guy has access to a USB stick with all the required software. All the data is in the cloud (even "My Documents" is on Sky Drive) so they just wipe the old machine and start fresh with a new one. They fired their IT guys (they had 2) and cancelled all their support contracts with local leeches. And everyone can work from home when they carry their laptops with them, even if the head office has no power or internet connection for some reason.

    I've been banging on about this for a years in dark corners of bars whilst having had too many to realise a) I'm boring and b) that's not a hot chick unexpectedly listening, but a poster on the wall next to me. It's about the benefits and costs of outsourcing.

    Seems to me there's a strong parallel with the way we can either let governments run things, or let governments decide what needs to be done and then contract the work out. The well-known problem with the former is that governments, without the feedback of competition, have a hard time working out even if they're doing well or not, let alone how to do better. The downside of using profit to incentivise better ways of doing things is that you're paying someone a profit.

    Much the same holds true with IT. You can contract your services out, at which point someone will complain about all the lost revenue - 'hey, we should start our own IT support company!' - or you keep them in-house, at which point you have no competition to drive improvement.

    Traditionally, these trade-offs have varied from company to company, depending on things like size, core competencies, and so-on. Now Microsoft are providing proper managed services, though, you'd be as bonkers to manage your own as you would be to build your own version of Office in-house rather than just buying MS Office. It may not be optimal, but the sub-optimality is definitely far-reduced from either previously existing option.



  • @Ronald said:

    In 2013 alone I've helped four different clients who decided to move their email platform to Office365.
    You're in the US. In Europe, the privacy laws are much stronger, and since Microsoft has proven that they do check the content of SkyDrive storage (there are two documented cases of them canceling accounts that had questionable [but not illegal!] content on them), which is why few companies will choose to trust their data to them. Additionally, Office365 Small Business costs 175€/year, while Office Home&Business is a one-time payment of 250€ (and in my experience, small businesses will use this for 5-10 years; likely 10, since Office 2013 allows you to transfer the license to a new computer).
    @Ronald said:
    For a long time I was under the impression that the smaller a company is, the more they benefit from this kind of setup, but as we crunched the numbers and reviewed their business processes, even for the company with 1100 employees it was worth it.
    This'd be all good, if the US had stronger privacy protection - it's actually illegal to host certain kinds of data in countries that have weaker privacy protections.



  • @ender said:

    You're in the US. In Europe, the privacy laws are much stronger, and since Microsoft has proven that they do check the content of SkyDrive storage (there are two documented cases of them canceling accounts that had questionable [but not illegal!] content on them), which is why few companies will choose to trust their data to them. Additionally, Office365 Small Business costs 175€/year, while Office Home&Business is a one-time payment of 250€ (and in my experience, small businesses will use this for 5-10 years; likely 10, since Office 2013 allows you to transfer the license to a new computer).

    The real issue is not the Office client license, it's the infrastructure (servers, sysadmins, etc).

    Let's take a 3-year window (typical hardware amortization) for a small business.

    Local infrastructure with SBS

    • 75 users (that's the maximum in SBS)
    • Server: 1 x $3000 = $3,000
    • SBS License (Standard w/5 CAL): 1 x $750 = $750
    • SBS CAL: 70 x $50 = $3,500
    • Office: 75 x $250 = $18,750
    • Sysadmin: 3 x $25,000 = $75,000
    • Total: $108,250

    Office365

    • 75 users (that's the maximum in SBS)
    • Office365 license: 75 * 36 * $15 = $40,500
    • Total: $40,500

    Office365 comes with a SLA (99.9% + depending on the product) that some dude in a 75-user company won't be able to meet, unless you start throwing in a lot of hardware for virtualization and stuff. Plus you need a solution for vacation time and sick days.

    About the sysadmin: Microsoft will take care of all the support: backups, patches, forgotten passwords, lost files, etc. I guarantee you that whatever the fuck else your sysadmin is doing ain't worth $22,850 a year. And that's supposing that you actually have a sysadmin for $25,000 at the moment, more likely it's 2 or 3 times that price plus taxes, vacations, payroll fees and whatnot.

    A company has to be pretty big for the cloud option to be more expensive.

    As for the privacy stuff:

    @Microsoft said:

    EU Model Clauses. In addition to being certified under EU Safe Harbor, Office 365 is the first major business productivity public cloud service provider to sign the standard contractual clauses created by the European Union (“EU Model Clauses”) with all customers. EU Model Clauses address international transfers of data.

    Read about it, they actually did their homework for just about every situation.



  • @Ronald said:

    About the sysadmin: Microsoft will take care of all the support: backups, patches, forgotten passwords, lost files, etc. I guarantee you that whatever the fuck else your sysadmin is doing ain't worth $22,850 a year. And that's supposing that you actually have a sysadmin for $25,000 at the moment, more likely it's 2 or 3 times that price plus taxes, vacations, payroll fees and whatnot.
    The businesses I work with are companies with 5-30 users, and eg. a company with 30 users pays us 190€/month (2280€/year), which covers managing their server (patches, backup checking etc., but not adding/removing users), and two hours of work on workstations. And as I said, most of our clients use computers for 5+ years (it's getting worse due to recession - our hardware sales are 1/3 of what they were 3 years ago), and suddenly Microsoft's cloud offer is not that cheap anymore (for this particular client, the server cost was ~10200€, but they needed SQL, so that includes SBS Premium and CALs for it; their old server was running SBS 2003 Premium, and was probably 8 or 9 years old - we only got this client last year. Biggest problem are workstations, since nearly all of them are still XP, most with Office 2003. I upgraded the few that had 2007 to Windows 8 when it was available for 30€, but the rest will have to be replaced).
    @Ronald said:
    Read about it, they actually did their homework for just about every situation.
    Except when they get a NSL, and have to give the data to US government, which would never request any such access to help domestic companies, right?



  • @ender said:

    @Ronald said:
    About the sysadmin: Microsoft will take care of all the support: backups, patches, forgotten passwords, lost files, etc. I guarantee you that whatever the fuck else your sysadmin is doing ain't worth $22,850 a year. And that's supposing that you actually have a sysadmin for $25,000 at the moment, more likely it's 2 or 3 times that price plus taxes, vacations, payroll fees and whatnot.
    The businesses I work with are companies with 5-30 users, and eg. a company with 30 users pays us 190€/month (2280€/year), which covers managing their server (patches, backup checking etc., but not adding/removing users), and two hours of work on workstations. And as I said, most of our clients use computers for 5+ years (it's getting worse due to recession - our hardware sales are 1/3 of what they were 3 years ago), and suddenly Microsoft's cloud offer is not that cheap anymore (for this particular client, the server cost was ~10200€, but they needed SQL, so that includes SBS Premium and CALs for it; their old server was running SBS 2003 Premium, and was probably 8 or 9 years old - we only got this client last year. Biggest problem are workstations, since nearly all of them are still XP, most with Office 2003. I upgraded the few that had 2007 to Windows 8 when it was available for 30€, but the rest will have to be replaced).
    @Ronald said:
    Read about it, they actually did their homework for just about every situation.
    Except when they get a NSL, and have to give the data to US government, which would never request any such access to help domestic companies, right?

    So they have that server for 5 or 8 years. What happens when the power supply dies after the warranty is gone? Is that included in your 200€, parts and service? And what happens when a moron wipes his entire inbox? What is your response time, and how often will you come to their rescue?

    Of course if you budget for sunny days it's easy to claim low costs. That was exactly the case with one of my clients; the "IT guy" was only $500 a month and the servers were all paid for, but running the figures for the last 3 years we found out he was paying almost $700 a year per user. Even with the biggest plan on Office365 and a shitload of Azure VMs they saved about half of that money.



  • @Ronald said:

    So they have that server for 5 or 8 years. What happens when the power supply dies after the warranty is gone? Is that included in your 200€, parts and service? And what happens when a moron wipes his entire inbox? What is your response time, and how often will you come to their rescue?
    We do try to move the clients to newer hardware once it's out of warranty period, but in the end it's not our decision to do so. As far as parts are concerned, they need to be available for at least 7 years after purchase, even if they do cost a fortune when the server is EOLd.


    Morons that wipe their inbox (though it's more common that they wipe stuff on network shares) are covered by backup, but so far we only had 1 incident (monthly backup testing is part of the contract). Our guaranteed response time is 4 hours, but during business day it's usually less than an hour.
    @Ronald said:
    Of course if you budget for sunny days it's easy to claim low costs. That was exactly the case with one of my clients; the "IT guy" was only $500 a month and the servers were all paid for, but running the figures for the last 3 years we found out he was paying almost $700 a year per user. Even with the biggest plan on Office365 and a shitload of Azure VMs they saved about half of that money.
    One of our smaller clients (7 users) was actually thinking of moving to Azure, but the plan was shot down by their parent company.



  • @ender said:

    he businesses I work with are companies with 5-30 users, and eg. a company with 30 users pays us 190€/month (2280€/year), which covers managing their server (patches, backup checking etc., but not adding/removing users), and two hours of work on workstations.
    OK, but who does their IT management and support? From what you're saying, your clients are paying €2280 a year for, er, making sure Windows Update is running on their servers and that the virus scanner is auto-updating? They're going to need a sysadmin and support guy on top of your employer's little scam.


    A proper MSP would be charging at least £25 per user per month - £9k a year for 30 users - and still expect an in-house IT-contract-manager at that price. If the client doesn't have an in-house manager, most MSPs will sell them one part-time, or whatever, but his time will be charged out at £100k+ per year levels.


    The suggestion that one might quibble over paying say £20k a year to support thirty users who even at minimum wage are earning £300k a year between them is TRWTF.

    @ender said:

    (it's getting worse due to recession - our hardware sales are 1/3 of what they were 3 years ago)
    Then it's plainly not due to the recession, is it?



  • @TDWTF123 said:

    OK, but who does their IT management and support? From what you're saying, your clients are paying €2280 a year for, er, making sure Windows Update is running on their servers and that the virus scanner is auto-updating? They're going to need a sysadmin and support guy on top of your employer's little scam.
    We're doing their IT support - the price includes 2 hours of work on workstations per-month (anything more is billed separately, but at least with this client, 2 hours covers everything most months; before we sign a long-term contract, we do a 3-6 month trial, after which we check how many billable hours we needed per month, and also suggest other things that could be improved. The contract is then set up to include the average number of hours they needed us in this time - this can vary a lot from client to client).



  • @ender said:

    We're doing their IT support - the price includes 2 hours of work on workstations per-month (anything more is billed separately, but at least with this client, 2 hours covers everything most months
    Are you seriously suggesting that the sum total of a 30-person company's desktop support and administration requirements can be met in two hours a month? Four minutes per machine? Fuck, for thirty users, you'll spend two hours a month just telling them to put more paper in the printer.


    I'd say you're making it up as you go along, except that would imply you were going somewhere with this rubbish.



  • @TDWTF123 said:

    Are you seriously suggesting that the sum total of a 30-person company's desktop support and administration requirements can be met in two hours a month? Four minutes per machine? Fuck, for thirty users, you'll spend two hours a month just telling them to put more paper in the printer.
    No such problems (if there were, we'd have higher number of hours specified in the contract). Most clients have a designated contact person who can do some basic troubleshooting, before calling us (this saves us from having to head out for unplugged cables, and saves the client from paying us to babysit problematic employees).



  • @ender said:

    We're doing their IT support - the price includes 2 hours of work on workstations per-month (anything more is billed separately, but at least with this client, 2 hours covers everything most months; before we sign a long-term contract, we do a 3-6 month trial, after which we check how many billable hours we needed per month, and also suggest other things that could be improved. The contract is then set up to include the average number of hours they needed us in this time - this can vary a lot from client to client).

    This was the main issue for almost all my clients that are smaller companies: having to buy blocks of support hours that they are not sure they will actually need (which is the equivalent of a retainer or a mobile phone contract). And whenever they complained about this, the best answer they got was that they could go with a "on-demand" plan that had an insane hourly rate attached to it. That's a typical practice in IT support outsourcing and it sucks. Basically the vendor is offloading their lack of agility to the client.

    What I do is the opposite: clients can ask for support whenever they need it, for blocks of as little as 5 minutes with a decent rate (not cheap but not overpriced); no contracts. And at the end of every year I lower my hourly rate for them based on how many hours they paid (ever). They really like it because they feel no pressure yet when they need something they have an incentive to call (and pay their bills) because this will bit by bit affect their discount for the next year. For good clients we also waive a specific number of short calls every month (they show up on their invoice with a $0 item price).

    It was a bit challenging at first and I had to work pretty hard to figure out how many clients I could take at once. I had to keep a low volume to maintain high quality. Now it's going pretty smooth, I don't do this kind of support myself anymore but I have contractors who handle it. (I work myself only for a small number of old clients that I bill on a daily basis.)

    People really like not having a gun pointed at their head, especially for stuff that has nothing to do with their core business.



  • @ender said:

    Most clients have a designated contact person who can do some basic troubleshooting, before calling us
    And there it is... So in fact the client does indeed have an in-house support guy.



  • @Ronald said:

    This was the main issue for almost all my clients that are smaller companies: having to buy blocks of support hours that they are not sure they will actually need (which is the equivalent of a retainer or a mobile phone contract).
    We're pretty flexible with hours, and unused hours transfer to the next month (up to 3 months), and if we notice that the hours are not getting used, we will suggest to change the contract to reflect that.
    @Ronald said:
    What I do is the opposite: clients can ask for support whenever they need it, for blocks of as little as 5 minutes with a decent rate (not cheap but not overpriced); no contracts.
    We don't actually require a contract - if the client doesn't need a guaranteed response time, we'll just bill them by the time used (in 15-minute increments).
    @TDWTF123 said:
    And there it is... So in fact the client does indeed have an in-house support guy.
    In most cases that's the secretary.


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