An additional advantage for Microsoft is this move obscures a substantial price increase for most customers. Microsoft's official word is, "The customers are getting more, so they should expect to pay more". This is similar to when, without changing product prices, they eliminated "concurrent licensing" and changed the requirement from "per user" to "per named user". In other words, from number of simultaneous users to a license required for each and every possible user.

Here is a comparison for SQL Server Enterprise: SQL Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition "per seat" with 25 users: $7,999, $140 each for additional users; SQL Server Enterprise 2000 "per processor": $19,999.

Along with the licensing change is a name change from Back Office to Microsoft Server Family, which makes more sense to most people. When we say "server" here, we mean server as a software process, not "server" as computer hardware. A server (computer) may run several servers (software process) at once. Due to performance and stability issues, Microsoft recommends running only one major server (software) on each server (computer), so "server" in the Microsoft sense generally ends up meaning "server farm", thus the need to license Application Center to keep them coordinated.

Microsoft is expanding the Server Family with several new Internet oriented servers. These are listed below as "not priced yet".

• SQL Server Enterprise 2000: $20,000 per processor.
• SQL Server Standard 2000: $5,000 per processor.
• Host Integration Server: $7,500 per processor (mainframe connectivity).
• Internet Security and Acceleration Server $1,500 per processor (proxy server).
• BizTalk Server 2000: (not priced yet) (XML business to business interchange).
• Application Center 2000: (not priced yet) (coordinates the members of a server farm).
• Commerce Server 2000: (not priced yet) (e-Commerce).
• Exchange Server 2000: (stays with per user pricing) (e-mail).