Re: Is Intel exceptionally unsuccessful as an architecture designer?

On 18/09/2024 22:57, Brett wrote:

David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 18/09/2024 02:42, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Wed, 18 Sep 2024 02:54:51 +0300, Michael S wrote:
>

There are few things Intel would wish more than to "suffer"
financially like Microsoft.

>
It is true that Microsoft is not (yet) losing money, but still the
revenues from its Windows cash cow cannot be what they used to be, if you
look at the declining level of investment Microsoft is putting back into
its flagship OS.
>

>
I think MS has long ago stopped viewing desktop Windows as a cash cow.
But it still gets in a lot of money from server versions, as well as
server software such as MS SQL server.  (The client access licences for
these cost far more than Windows desktop ever did.)

 There are lots of free SQL servers now, this has forced Microsoft to make
MS SQL Express free for smaller than enterprise editions.
 https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=101064
 https://josipmisko.com/posts/sql-express-limitations#
 Those limits dwarf our needs.

We have just recently had to buy a Windows server and MS SQL server license, in order to run a third-party application that insists those are the requirements and they won't support the use of SQL Express.  The server hardware cost about $1200 (my price estimates here are very rough) for a mini PC with 64 GB ram, running Proxmox.  Windows server license was about $1000, and SQL Server was $1200, and there was the same again for the CALs needed.  So something like 75% of the cost of the box is license fees to Microsoft - and that was as cheap as we could get within the requirements of the third-party application.  That same application could have been written in a few thousand lines of Python and run on a Rasberry Pi with an external disk for storage.  MS make a lot of profit from being the "industry standard" and persuading specialist software developers that Windows and MS SQL server are the server platforms of choice.