
Dell Unveils Subscription Model to Counter Amazon, Microsoft - jmsflknr
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-12/dell-unveils-subscription-model-to-counter-amazon-microsoft
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windexh8er
Considering equipment leases have been around forever I feel like this is just
a way to say "why yes, we do subscriptions as well!". The _real_ takeaway here
is it's not that subscribers (customers) want this. It's that Wall Street
wants this because: investors. This is because deferred futures are great for
smoothing and forecasting of revenue. Subscriptions are ultimately bad for the
buyer because you pay more and get less in most situations. And then you have
vendors offering subscriptions that literally have taken formerly perpetually
sold product and wrapped it up in a subscription model with little to no value
add. It's also given vendors a way to lock customers out of support and
upgrades. I'm waiting for the pushback... People complain about it, but not as
vocally as they should.

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Spooky23
Microsoft’s upgrade cycles for Windows 10 are a big problem for many
companies. Many places deferred PC upgrade cycles for 6-10 years because they
didn’t need them.

Now they are stuck with an accelerated upgrade cycle and big capex.

With respect to other subscriptions, I think that you’ll see pushback. Adobe
and Microsoft play hardball, which gets old quick.

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jklehm
I don't follow, Win10 runs on a 9 year old pc for me without issue?

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hermitdev
I think it's more of a will this update cripple our 20yr old in house
developed app that is crucial for the business that either we don't know how
to maintain or lost the source no longer working on the latest windows.

Previous employer, we were on WinXP and compiling a/ VS2003. Upgrade to Win7
mostly effectively crippled VS2003 for reasons I don't know. This necessitated
porting our very large (100s of Millions of LOC in C++ to at least VS2008) set
of in-house libraries. It should on paper be trivial, but it was a firm wide
effort that spanned 18 months. Why? Because someone sent the CEO an xlsx that
he couldn't open. This was circa 2007-2008. We were forced to upgrade OS and
compiler for the new Office version, but it trickled into a firm wide rebuild
of all C++ code. Wasnt pretty or fun.

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vbezhenar
LTSB edition is supposed to fix that. Unfortunately their licensing for LTSB
is strange and not friendly...

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wongarsu
That would likely turn the 18 month upgrade effort into a 36 month upgrade
effort that happens 5 years later.

Sometimes long upgrade cycles are great, but I suspect a yearly upgrade to the
latest Visual Studio would have been a lot less painful. Fixing a few small
issues is much easier than fixing many of them, and having to do it yearly
both makes everyone better at doing it and better at avoiding the creation of
such issues.

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amanzi
This article is light on details but this doesn't seem to be the same thing as
leasing as others here have said. This is more akin to offerings from HPE and
IBM where you get a whole bunch of infrastructure, but then only pay for what
you consume. It's Infrastructure as a Service, but in your own data centre.

Not sure how this translates to personal computing though - typically you're
either using the whole computer or none of it. I guess you could get a whole
bunch of desktops and then only pay for the 8 hours a day that you're using
them? Doesn't quite have the same scalability benefits as you can get from the
compute infrastructure.

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jacques_chester
It's the difference between paying for _capacity_ and paying for
_consumption_. Which is useful, it opens a variety of potential economies and
options for both Dell and their customers.

Many customers are fine doing their own planning and dislike being billed
after the fact. Charging for capacity is what they want. That is the common
case now.

Many other customers resent bearing the risk of over-provisioning or under-
provisioning. Charging for consumption solves that for them. That's what Dell
is adding. It's not totally new to them, EMC have done something like this for
some time now.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, which is part of the Dell EMC keiritsu.

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alberth
It’s interesting how hardware manufacturers have offered the ability to lease
equipment for literally decades.

Now, they start calling it a “subscription” and Wallstreet thinks it’s
innovation.

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thisisnico
I work in infrastructure... Nothing has changed here. This is leasing. Dell
also has a division named Dell Financial Services that will lease or loan you
the hardware.

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jrochkind1
I don't totally understand what they mean, the press-release-style article
isn't very specific. But:

> Customers will now be able to use Dell’s hardware based on their
> consumption, as a service… For the consumption programs, customers pay for
> the amount of storage or computing power they use.

That part sounds different than an ordinary lease, yes? I'm not totally sure I
understand what it is though... the hardware on-premise at the customer for
their exclusive use? But somehow it's usage is metered?

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mfer
This reminds me of HPE greenlake [1].

I wonder how the TCO compares to public clouds

[1] [https://www.hpe.com/us/en/services/it-
consumption.html](https://www.hpe.com/us/en/services/it-consumption.html)

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hamandcheese
Installment plans, not software, are eating the world.

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ImprovedSilence
How depressingly true. Run out of technical innovation? Let's switch to
subscription services!

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lonelappde
2017 version: [https://www.techradar.com/news/dell-to-bring-pay-monthly-
sub...](https://www.techradar.com/news/dell-to-bring-pay-monthly-
subscriptions-to-pcs)

It would be a total Amazon power move for Dell to displace one of its
customers' businesses by removing the middle-man in computer rental (aka
"cloud computing") businesss.

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wrkronmiller
The hardware is only a small component. Hosting and maintenance are others.

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big_chungus
How does this make sense when you're dealing with a rapidly-depreciating
asset? Many businesses seem to be using "subscription" as a veil for "payment
plan", as they are not delivering a service or recurring good.

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hinkley
Labor and transportation also cost. And turnaround time introduces friction.

If you’re staring at slow servers and someone says they can fix that in 20
minutes for another few bucks a month then that is the easy way out.

Also redundant hardware can be used to deal with hardware failures. No rush to
swap out the machine. There are three spares.

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daxfohl
Seems like a tough sell, with Amazon offering their new Outposts product,
which is also an onsite datacenter subscription model but also integrates
seamlessly with AWS.

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jacques_chester
Dell is closely connected with VMware, which also integrates seamlessly with
AWS. And Azure and GCP. Everyone has dived into the all-places, all-clouds
pool to try and outmaneuver each other.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we're being acquired by VMware.

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sysbin
I wish Apple would do this for their laptops. I'm not really sure how it could
be done. Will be interesting to see how Dell handles the cost.

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ac29
They do, they just call it leasing:
[https://www.apple.com/financing/](https://www.apple.com/financing/)

