"And what an investment it has been: an initial payment of
US$348 million to Novell... with US$240 million tagged specifically
for those infamous subscription certificates for SUSE Enterprise
Linux to hand out or resell to interested customers. Indeed, this
was the thrust of the SD Times article: that Microsoft is almost
through passing these coupons out.
"The thought that was actually provoked came from this sentence
in the article: "A total of 475 customers have used an unspecified
number of coupons, according to Microsoft."
"This struck me as a very interesting figure, because after
firing up XCalc, I figured out that if indeed just 475 customers
have received these coupons, then Microsoft has essentially
subsidized SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) deployments an
average tune of US$505,263.16 per customer."
