Microsoft gives away licenses via relationship credits at a fraction of 1 off subscriptions to tons of large enterprise clients. They would know that if they'd ever had a real job in tech that carried any responsibility.
I have immense respect for those who deal with any kind of national American infrastructure. I refer to the USA as "The continent that became a country" because no other countries have roots in growth that fast but the level of homogeny that most Americans seem to fee
How many extra licenses is it worth paying for in exchange for not having cronies installed in every government org? I would accept a lot of "inefficiency" for a government I could trust.
Ah yes, because purchasing a license at $100 per seat per month one at a time is really cost effective and also good practice for when you're hiring and onboarding people...
Those look suspiciously like five-point responses demanded by DOGE, hastily provided by interns at GSA and DoL whose bosses asked them to "just make up some shit about Winzip licences or VS code, that'll keep them quiet for a while".
We didn't need DOGE for this, we have (or had) Inspector Generals that do this. In 2023 the NASA IG identified $35M in wasteful software licenses. The NASA IG at the time - Paul Martin, the USAID IG who Trump and Musk recently fired.
I'm not sure how it works now, but when I was at Microsoft you bought licenses in batches. Organizations keep inventory of licenses available to provision new employees, adjust licensing across large organizations with multiple verticals, etc. This is SO stupid.
They also may not know how "true-up"policies work. That's a sales policy I learned at a "real job"... something some of them haven't been old enough to experience
WE FOUND 100 REAMS OF PRINTER PAPER JUST SITTING AROUND BUT ONLY 200 PAGES OF PRINT JOBS QUEUED ACROSS ALL THE PRINTERS THIS IS UNCONSCIONABLE WASTE AND FRAUD
I FOUND A BOX OF PAPER CLIPS IN A DRAWER IN AN ALMOST EMPTY FILE CABINET, THE BOARD HAS CALLED AN EMERGENCY SESSION. THIS ABUSE HAS SPIRALED IUT OF CONTROL.
When you’re 15 you can get a permit for cybersecurity, and at 16, after some classroom training, you can get a license to drive your cybersecurity on public inter-web tubes.
Just don’t get caught speeding on the information highway.
Dozens of vending machines with quarters just sitting in the return tray, hundreds of dimes found in the crawl space behind cubicles. Hundreds of thousand of pennys in the fountains NEVER COLLECTED.
Do these people understand floating licenses at all? That's most likely a floating license pool shared by more than 380 people which would actually make it a cost savings.
The people who are trolling around looking for something (anything) (anything at all) to report are kids who've never had to buy bulk licenses for anything. The closest they've come is getting a second Windows 11 license key for the new gaming desktop.
Much better to wait for the demand to exist first and then bottleneck everything else while purchase and setup gets done (without a hitch, presumably).
Once again, this is how a sweaty, 17 year-old assistant manager at Kinko's thinks.
I love how I see the original post made six hours ago, and as someone with experience running a business, I think of like 10 reasons why this update is likely a crock of shit, and 40+ people have already posted all of them.
This is the kind of thing that doge supporters are dumb enough to brag about as a W while normal humans will be driven absolutely insane at its obliviousness.
Kind of a 4D chess move: make your acolytes dumber and everyone else so unproductively angry they want to jump off a bridge.
I had a Mac user call me a couple days ago. They were trying to open a zip file and they were getting a “license expired” message. Now, I haven’t zipped or unzipped anything in a couple years, but I could swear it’s built in to OS X. Of course it is.
Is there some possibility the US federal government doesn't count as a private or commercial entity? I haven't read through all the license terms, but that popped out to me, that it's free for those entities....
Just about any CTO or ITAM they would say this license position is great considering the scope of the org and knows that it would cost a lot more to do any reconciliation on this kind of margin.
"Like most people with no grasp whatsoever of real economics, Mustrum Ridcully equated 'proper financial control' with the counting of paper clips. Even senior wizards had to produce a pencil stub to him before they were allowed a new one out of the locked cupboard below his desk."
Someone signed into the Admin Azure center for the first time and clicked on the licenses tab lmao. Could these even be one time licenses prior to everything becoming SaaS?
FWIW, you also have to carry more licenses than employees to account for attrition, turnover, and laptop refreshes. These guys really have no clue if they think software licensing is proof of some grand conspiracy of thousands of fake government employees.
DOGE-age kids are still at the career stage where they meticulously optimize their initialization code that only runs once and only takes 30 ms to begin with.
I'm also not a genius at this, but the cost of 1-5 extra 365 accounts per office with any sort of turnover saved our company onboarding time and money because we could start someone fresh while IT archived and reset the old account.
Yep I have about 30 extra licenses so I can onboard new staff and keep former employee mailboxes during a transition, also to deal with litigation holds. Elon is (contrary to Nate Silver and Matt Yglesias) an idiot
Yep, this is absolutely it. We (I work in tech) keep a comfortable number of overflow licenses so that we never find ourselves accidentally in contract violation when the employee population fluctuates.
No, fucking really. I accept this uncritically. Dredging up work already done months ago by someone you fired and passing it off on your own is absolutely on fucking brand for this limpdick
Musk should tell his acne brigade to have a word with some real engineers in SpaceX about the engineering concept of redundancy - and to give examples of it in SpaceX and state how much they "cost".
It’s almost like DOGE has a bunch of people who have never run a large enterprise before or who have had to be ready to scale. But that can’t be it, can it?
I've done license usage audits during normal times, and actual usage is about 200% of what you can find by asking people. When everyone hates you and thinks you're trying to fire them? good luck.
Comments
FFS Elon is a moron.
Something of a pattern here though
EAs are usually 3 years terms and it's difficult to impossible to shrink the count between renewals.
https://prolib.substack.com/p/the-techbro-plan-to-splinter-the?utm_campaign=post&showWelcomeOnShare=true
thanks, DOGE
https://www.oversight.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/2023-01/IG-23-008.pdf
https://bsky.app/profile/bestsloth.bsky.social/post/3lj3mqabmnk2q
Oh yeah.. dysfunction is a feature, not a bug.
SLEEPY JOE BIDEN AND CROOKED HILLARY CLINTON WERE OBVIOUSLY STORING THEM THERE ILLEGALLY
#LOCKTHEMUP
But seriously: WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE SO IGNORANT YET SO CONFIDENT AS TO PUT IT ON DISPLAY LIKE THAT! It's exasperating.
Also: They are breaking your country and I'm so sorry
It’s a free (gratis) product.
Also, what is a "cybersecurity license"?
Just don’t get caught speeding on the information highway.
Like the government.
All children.
Including the musky one.
(VSCode is free and open source.)
Once again, this is how a sweaty, 17 year-old assistant manager at Kinko's thinks.
This is just bullshit that uneducated imbeciles will point to and yell “fire”.
Doing the lord’s work, y’all
Kind of a 4D chess move: make your acolytes dumber and everyone else so unproductively angry they want to jump off a bridge.
Nobody pays for Winzip
If Elon is posting these crumbs, he hasn’t found shit.
It's a house of cards best avoided.
Where are my billions and my direct access to Donald?
Did you know they bought 1000 pens and only use 238 of them? And don’t get me started on pencils.
What waste.
Still pathetic of them to think this is a "gotcha!" win for these DOGE idiots, tho 😂