Half a Loaf...

...is, well, half a loaf. I'm referring to yesterday's announcement from the Visual Studio Team System folks that they're listening to customers and adjusting the pricing for VSTS, especially as it relates to small shops and MSDN subscribers. You may recall when the pricing was first announced that there was a fair amount of complaining from developers in two categories. First, folks in small development shops were concerned that the licensing costs for Team Foundation Server ($2800) were prohibitive, even if they took advantage of the offer to move their existing MSDN-Universal subscriptions over to one of the role-based Team System Editions. Second, independent consultants and developers whose functions cross the architect-developer-tester boundaries on a regular basis saw the pricing for the full Team Suite product ($4600 a year as opposed to the $2300 a year for the individual role-based editions) as being a ridiculous price jump over the current MSDN-Universal pricing, especially when coupled with the need to purchase Team Foundation Server separately to enable the full functionality of VSTS.

Reading yesterday's announcement, it looks like good news for the first group, and no news at all for the second. Basically, if you're a shop with five developers or less, and you're getting your VSTS via upgrading existing MSDN subscriptions, you get TFS thrown in for free. That's good news, and a significant pricing reduction on Microsoft's part. They're getting praised for listening to customers in this regard, and rightly so. This is also good news for the MSDN subscriber who wants to play around a bit with one of the role-based editions including the server-side bits to see how it all fits together.

Unfortunately, developers in the second group - among whom, to be perfectly clear, I count myself - aren't really going to be a lot happier under the new pricing. Sure, now I can set up Team Suite for myself, including the server bits, for $4600 instead of $7400. Looked at one way, that's almost a 40% price drop from the initial announced pricing, by virtue of the free five-user TFS license. But looked at another way (the way that most of us little guys are going to look at it). it's still a 100% increase over the current MSDN-Universal pricing. No matter how seductive the marketing is for VSTS, there's nothing in there to tempt me to spend that sort of money to step up to Microsoft's integrated tools over my current set of good-enough third-party tools. I'm still weighing my options, but I'm still inclining towards downgrading my subscription to the Professional level and saving a few hundred bucks a year. Judging by the Larkware Survey results, I'm not alone.

Frankly, I'm surprised that Microsoft made this strong a concession in their pricing model for VSTS. And it's clear to me that the fundamental problem here is a mismatch between the whole idea of role-based products and jack-of-all-trades consultants. Fortunately for those of us who've chosen this path, there are still plenty of other alternatives - and fortunately for Microsoft, they don't need us to sell VSTS seats into the Fortune 1000, which is where they're going to have to make their numbers.

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.