You Assessed It Three Years Ago. Is It Still the Same Product?
Every check an organisation applies to software happens at the point of selection. The product then changes continuously, and the control never fires again. Most organisations pay the revised price without reviewing what they now own.
Microsoft’s revised pricing for its main productivity suites takes effect in a fortnight, justified by the capability added to them since the last increase.
Most organisations will pay it. Rather fewer will have looked at what the product became in the meantime.
1. The Assessment Was Thorough, and Rightly So
Buying enterprise software properly takes months. Requirements, a shortlist, a security review, a data protection assessment, reference calls, a negotiation at the end of it.
It is slow because the commitment is large and long — and nobody sensible skips it, because the organisations that do usually regret it inside two years.
At the end of all that a decision is recorded, the file is closed, and everybody moves on to the next thing. Which is where the trouble starts.
2. The Product Did Not Stay Still
What was assessed was the product as it stood on that particular day. It has not stood still since.
Microsoft’s own account of the current changes cites well over a thousand new features across productivity, security and management — with capabilities that once required a separate purchase now folded into the suites. The revised prices apply from the first of July.
The same pattern runs right across the market. Capability arrives, it is bundled, and the bundle is repriced — usually with the added value cited as the reason.
3. Nothing Improper Has Happened
It is worth saying plainly that this is not sharp practice.
Vendors have shipped what customers asked for — and a product unchanged in three years would be the worse purchase, not the better one. The contract permits all of it, and somebody read the contract before signing.
The difficulty is not the vendor’s conduct. It is that the organisation’s governance assumed a moment which does not recur.
4. The Control Point Has Expired
Every check an organisation applies to software happens at the point of selection. Security review, data protection assessment, commercial negotiation, sign-off — all of it front-loaded into a fortnight three years ago.
All of it examined a product that no longer exists. What runs in the organisation today was never assessed by anyone, because the assessment was of its ancestor.
Nothing has failed here, and nobody has been careless. The control simply fires once, and the product changes continuously.
5. You Cannot Decline It and Keep the Price
The awkward part is that new capability is not optional in any useful sense.
It arrives inside the tier already purchased, and there is rarely a version without it available at the old price. Choosing not to use something is not the same as choosing not to pay for it.
The harder version is a change to the licensing model rather than the product. Broadcom’s rework of VMware moved customers from perpetual licences onto subscription bundles with substantially higher minimum commitments — a change significant enough that European service providers took a complaint to the Commission in March.
6. Some of It Is Genuinely Worth Having
None of which makes bundling extraction by default. Quite often it is straightforwardly good value.
Capability that once needed a separate product, a separate contract and a separate integration now arrives included — and for an organisation that would have bought it anyway, the arithmetic is favourable.
The problem is not that the answer is always bad. It is that most organisations never work it out at all, and pay whichever way it happens to fall.
7. What a Review Actually Requires
This does not need a programme. It needs somebody with the time and the standing to ask four questions once a year:
- what has been added to the product since it was assessed
- which of those capabilities are switched on, and who turned them on
- what data the new capabilities process, and whether anybody reviewed that
- what the price has done, and against what stated justification
The second surprises people most often, because the answer tends to be an administrator rather than a decision.
8. Somebody Has to Read the Release Notes
The practical gap is entirely mundane. Release notes are published and terms are updated, and both are read by nobody with the authority to act on them.
That is not negligence. It is a job nobody was ever given — because when these controls were designed, products did not change after they were purchased.
An organisation can assign that job for a fraction of a day each month, or it can find out at renewal.
Final Thought
Software used to be something an organisation bought. It is now a relationship that continues, and the terms of it are revised periodically by one party.
Which makes the assessment file less a record of what was purchased than a photograph of what was purchased once — and worth reopening rather more often than most organisations trouble to.