Forum Discussion
Sharing without Pro license
Yup, the publish to WWW is nice, for private use and maybe small business.
And also for short sharing, however having reports which have a weekly update about status should be viewable by multi users for free.
Microsoft can take the license on the real developers, who consume most of the capacity.
It should be noted though, the use of Power BI involves Microsoft hardware performing the calculations and providing the bandwidth for all of the viewers. This isn't 2nd rate hardware and considering Premium is basically leasing your own private equivelent hardware at a rate of $5000K per month, you can start to see what the costs of hardware provisioning. It seems to me that Microsoft wants to offer service with a free component essentially paid for out of the pricing of the paid users. A line in the sand has be to placed somewhere for this cloud service. How fair is it if Free users are the majority of the user base and that cost burden is lumped on the Paid users?
Chances are, in the use case you are proposing, having 1 paid developer and many free consumers would be a system that would be a large cost burden. Microsoft isn't a charity and it is reasonable that they look to a financial model that does have some amount of return. Its also reasonable to expect that if a business is turning a profit in part due to a service they consume, that a cost is associated with that service.
I agree MS is not a charity :)
However, I don't like the fact to deliver first great service for free, get people a carrot in front of them and suddenly change this model.
And my idea contains a max of e.g. 100 free users and I also propose to increase the Pro license; that's manageable and the business case can be easier for lots of companies.
5000,- per month is a huge difference.
If the Pro user would be even 100,- per month I believe it's acceptable.
Or a model 100,- per month and above 100 free users you pay 200,- per month.
Give the choice to the customer, even better: Pro with higher license or indeed like it is now with the premium/pro.
This model is not fit for use as we can read in a lot of posts.
I don't have a problem with Microsoft needing to turn a profit. But I do have a problem with the fact that we adopted PBI as the corporate strategy under one pricing model and are now suddenly being told that model no longer applies. So we're in the process of adopting the technology, the business is throwing thousands and thousands of dollars into training people only to be told that to implement it the way it was originally promised will quadruple our monthly costs.
All I want is to be able to disable external sharing just like in SharePoint and OneDrive and everything else. Don't let people share stuff outside our tenant.
Consider a counter point, which i can't suggest is the real situation but a scenario that is plausible. What is Microsoft supposed to do if they created a Power BI Software as a Service model, like they did originally, but found they had miscalculated how that model would be taken up by the community. This miscalculation meant that the cost of running Power BI, as is, was at a tremendous loss. Next, Microsoft was able to see that the platform was growing in popularity and thus the loss would only continue to grow.
So what options do they have in that situation? Do they just shut up shop or do they make changes to the licensing in a way that ensures the program can continue?
I agree with all of you and indeed; MSis not a charity :)
However; I am giving now access to viewers with full PRO access, that means all functions, but they don't use it.
I really would be OK with:
- Pro for developer (me) of a higer rate than 10,- p/m e.g. 50,- who is able to share for 100 users for free
- A very Light version for e.g. 2,- p/m even, however this should be veruy simple and not the complex premium approach.
The difference is too big and you know we're human, so resistance to change happens a lot :)
Although I'm looking for an option that will cut cost but I cannot blame Microsoft for being intuitve and providing a great service that's affordable.
For all you that are complaining why MS is not providing free access or service, how would you react or feel if you owned MS. Would you allow such a free service? I think not! If you can't afford 9.99 a month, look for other solutions like MS Tabular, Crystal Reports or SQL Reporting. This is where your IT abilities should be thinking outside the box. Not whinning!
