Microsoft Brings In College Officials
to Discuss Complaints About Prices
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
The software giant Microsoft brought 28 education-technology administrators to its campus-like headquarters last week to talk about a controversial change the company made in its software pricing last year. But a company official who led the two-day meeting said it inspired no immediate changes in the company's policies.
"There was no 'ta-da' result," said Liz King, general manager of the company's education-customer unit, in an interview Friday. She said the company would consider the administrators' comments in crafting a new licensing option, which will be available in a few months. "We plan to make some changes," she said.
Critics blasted the company last year, when it dropped a licensing policy that was used by many colleges and universities. The old policy allowed some customers to buy copies of software based on how many people would be able to use it at a given time, rather than on the total number of computers with access to the software.
For instance, a university might buy 100 copies of Microsoft Word, a word-processing program, and place them on a central "server" computer on the campus network. Students, professors, and staff members could use the program from any computer on the network. But the server would allow only 100 users to open the program at any time.
Microsoft's new policy would require the same university to purchase rights to use Word on all of the computers linked to the network, meaning that many colleges would have to spend thousands of dollars more just to offer the same amount of access to the company's products.
At the annual CAUSE academic-technology conference in December, a group of college leaders met with Microsoft officials to disuss the new policy. Some of the academics complained that the changes in policy looked like a ploy to extract more money from customers who had become familiar with using Microsoft products.
At the meeting, Aleisa Spain, Microsoft's director of higher-education marketing, said the policy was "not a way for us at Microsoft to gain more revenue." She said that many business customers had complained that the old "concurrency" option was difficult to administer because they had to keep track of how many people were using software at a given time. She said the company was willing to talk further with college administrators to create a licensing policy that fit the needs of campuses.
Follow-up discussions led to last week's meeting in Redmond, Wash. The education administrators -- from universities, colleges, and secondary schools -- flew in at the company's expense. Half of the participants in the "advisory council" had been chosen by Microsoft field representatives. The others had been nominated by Barbara Horgan, director of information resources at Butler University, who runs an electronic discussion list for CAUSE on which college leaders have discussed the issue. CAUSE is made up of representatives from more than 1,400 colleges and universities.
The meeting was part field trip, part discussion group. It consisted of a day and a half of "breakout sessions" and other discussions, as well as tours of the company's high-tech operations, said Ms. King.
"I was very pleased with the tone," she added, saying that the college administrators did most of the talking. "Our licensing disadvantaged the way universities worked," she acknowledged. "Our licensing continued to be geared toward the public sector."
But she said there was no easy solution that would please both the company and college administrators.
Some college officials who attended the meeting said it had been productive. "I think Microsoft really listened to us," said Larry Rapagnani, assistant provost for information technologies at the University of Notre Dame, who was a vocal critic at last year's CAUSE meeting. "Will all this make any difference? I don't know." He said he looked forward to seeing what alternative policies the company would offer.
Ellen F. Falduto, chief information and planning officer for Hartwick College and another participant in last week's meeting, said that "skepticism remains among the participants as to what Microsoft will do." But she also said she was "generally pleased" with the meeting. "Time will tell on this one as we see more details of the emerging programs and continue our discussions with Microsoft staff," she said.
Background stories from The Chronicle:
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