Ah I see - good point, and it makes sense. I actually prefer they keep pushing up pricing on the Server and SQL solutions so that people like me will finally start seriously considering opensource solutions.
I work for a Microsoft partner and I am involved with their sales processes. The discussion is never around competing with open source. It's not on their radar. The majority of the discussion is about replacing Oracle, which is still dramatically more expensive than SQL Server Enterprise Edition.
Maybe that's true for list price, but it's definitely not true for my organization for negotiated price. We have ELAs in place for both Oracle and Microsoft and the upshot of it all is Oracle RDBMS is significantly cheaper for us than SQL Server. Enterprise licensing and contract negotiation is definitely a case of where YMMV.
I'm not intimate with Oracle pricing, but Microsoft doesn't want to sell just the RDBMS, but the entire SQL Server ecosystem. The enterprise license includes all of SSAS, SSRS, SSIS, integrated R in the DB, integrated SQL over big data sources, and a whole bunch of other stuff. My understanding is that the fully loaded cost of the entire data pipeline from source to business insight is where the TCO argument confess from.
I'm not trying to shill and hope I don't come across that way. I just want to share a semi-insider perspective to help others understand where MS is coming from. Do with that understanding what you will. I don't have a horse on this race.
