Microsoft fiddles with Vista Ultimate Assurance licensing

MICROSOFT IS TO slash the number of Vista Ultimate licences offered to members of its Software Assurance program.

Software Assurance (SA), which allows customers to buy Microsoft products in bulk at discount prices, seems to have fallen victim to small-print policy change, reducing Ultimate licensing to only one for every 100 seats of Vista Enterprise a company pays for.

According to WindowsSecrets.com, a customer with fewer than 600 Vista Enterprise licences can now only get a maximum of five copies of Ultimate.

Vista Ultimate is what you'd have though, the ultimate version of Vista. But Microsoft, on its Windows Vista Ultimate page, gives three reasons to discourage corporate use of Ultimate:

1) Its failure to work on multiple computers concurrently
2) Its incapacity to set controls in Group Policy for several
media features and
3) A drastic cut back to a five-year support agreement as opposed to a 10 year agreement for Vista Enterprise and Vista Business.

According to a spokesVole, Ultimate's lack of support for volume licensing (VL) comes down to technical and policy reasons: "As Windows Vista Ultimate contains consumer features such as Media Center, Movie Maker, and DVD Maker, we did not anticipate that enterprise customers would want to deploy Windows Vista Ultimate broadly throughout the enterprise, and therefore, chose not to add support for VL." µ