I once spent explaining the structural integrity of a load-bearing wall to my father-in-law, utilizing concepts of shear stress and lateral load distribution that I had barely memorized from a late-night Wikipedia binge. The reality was that I had accidentally backed my car into the garage siding and didn’t want to admit I was a clumsy driver.
I thought that if I made the “event” sound like a complex geological settling of the foundation, my incompetence would be mistaken for a victimhood of physics. I performed expertise to camouflage a mistake. It didn’t work-he just looked at the dent in the bumper and asked why the “geological settling” had a Ford logo-shaped imprint-but that impulse to wrap a simple truth in a shroud of technical jargon is a universal human failing.
It is also, quite profitably, a business model.
The Consultant’s Canvas
Julian sat in a high-backed leather chair that squeaked with every minor adjustment of his posture, watching a man named Aris draw what appeared to be a multi-dimensional chess board on a glass wall. Aris was a consultant, the kind of man who wore vests in the summer and spoke in a tone that suggested every sentence was a declassified secret. He was there to explain the licensing requirements for Julian’s expanding remote workforce, a task that Julian had initially thought would take .
They were now into the session, and Aris was currently explaining the “cascading compliance implications of hybrid-cloud virtualization in a multi-tenant environment.”
Julian, who had actually reached his decision on the license count while Aris was still talking about server “topology,” found himself nodding anyway. There is a specific kind of social pressure that occurs when you pay a man four hundred dollars an hour to solve a problem. If he tells you the answer is “buy twenty of these,” you feel cheated.
You feel like you’ve paid for a light switch when you were expecting a sunrise. But if he spends weaving a tapestry of edge cases, caveats, and “hypothetical audit triggers,” the invoice feels like a badge of honor. You aren’t just buying software; you are buying the survival of a storm you didn’t know was brewing.
Manufactured Complexity
This is the theater of manufactured complexity. It is the art of taking a two-column table and turning it into a three-hundred-page manual. In the world of IT infrastructure, specifically within the Byzantine halls of Microsoft licensing, this theater has a long and storied run. There is a peculiar, almost gravitational pull toward making things harder than they need to be.
The advisor whose fee depends on the problem seeming hard has no reason to reveal that your answer was a simple choice all along. If Aris told Julian that his choice between User and Device CALs (Client Access Licenses) boiled down to a simple count of heads versus hardware, the “consultation” would be over before the espresso cooled. Instead, Aris invoked the “shadow of the audit.” He spoke of “versioning parity” and “legacy CAL debt.” He turned a straightforward procurement task into a high-stakes game of regulatory chicken.
Source: Common backroom enterprise sales sentiment.
There is a statistic that haunts the backrooms of enterprise sales, though it is rarely phrased so bluntly. Roughly 74% of executive-level decision-makers report feeling more “confident” in a vendor’s solution when the technical documentation is too dense for them to actually read. In plain human terms, three out of four people would rather be told a beautiful lie about a labyrinth than be shown a straight line to the exit. We have been conditioned to believe that if something is easy to understand, it must be insufficient. We mistake the sweat on the consultant’s brow for the value of the cure.
The Performance of Holiness
I remember standing at my uncle’s funeral -a somber, rain-slicked affair where the priest was droning on about “the eternal transition of the spirit.” The priest was using such high-minded, circular metaphors that he eventually lost his place in his own notes. He started looping back to the same phrase about “the garden of the infinite” over and over.
It was so transparently a performance of “Holiness” rather than a moment of “Grief” that I felt a bubble of hysterical laughter rising in my throat. I had to cough into a handkerchief to hide a grin that would have branded me a sociopath. I wasn’t laughing at my uncle; I was laughing at the absurdity of the priest trying to make death sound “professional.”
In the same way, the IT consultant tries to make a server license sound like a spiritual journey.
When you look at something like Remote Desktop Services (RDS), the core question is almost always the same: How many people need to get in, and what are they using to do it? But if you ask a traditional licensing reseller, they will ask you about your growth plan, your disaster recovery protocols, and whether you’ve considered the “strategic flexibility of a subscription-based Opex model versus a perpetual Capex investment.” They are selling you the confusion because they are the only ones who can sell you the clarity later.
The Grocery List Logic
The truth is that for the vast majority of businesses, the decision-making process for RDS CALs is a series of binary switches. Are your employees working from dedicated office desktops? Buy Device CALs. Do they hop from a laptop at the airport to a tablet at home to a workstation at the office? Buy User CALs. Do you have a Windows Server 2022 environment? Buy 2022 licenses. It is not a labyrinth; it is a grocery list.
The tragedy of the theater is that it wastes the one thing IT managers have the least of: time. Julian’s with Aris didn’t just cost him the consulting fee; it cost him the ninety minutes he could have spent actually deploying the server, or going home to see his kids, or staring at a wall in blessed silence. We have allowed ourselves to be convinced that the “process” of choosing is as important as the choice itself.
The Rebellion of Simplicity
There is a profound, almost rebellious power in a business that refuses to play this game. When you encounter a source like the RDS CAL Store, the immediate reaction is often a strange kind of suspicion. We are so used to the Arises of the world that when we see a store that says, “Here are your 2022 User CALs, they cost this much, and they’ll be in your inbox in ,” we look for the catch. We look for the hidden complexity. We wonder where the three-axis chart is.
But the lack of theater isn’t a lack of expertise; it is the highest form of it. It takes a lot of knowledge to make something sound complicated, but it takes a genuine mastery to make it sound simple. It is the difference between a chef who hides a bad cut of meat under a gallon of heavy sauce and one who serves a perfect steak with nothing but salt. The salt doesn’t hide anything.
Julian eventually signed the contract Aris presented, which included a “licensing optimization roadmap” that Julian knew he would never look at again. He paid for the performance. He paid for the of glass-wall drawing because it made the purchase “defensible” to his CFO. “Look at all the edge cases we covered,” he would say, pointing at the scribbles.
But as Aris packed his expensive markers into his leather bag, Julian realized that the entire meeting had been a tax on his own uncertainty. He had been paying a premium for the consultant to hold his hand through a door that wasn’t even locked.
If we strip away the jargon-the “perpetual rights,” the “down-leveling permissions,” the “CAL equivalency stacks”-what we are left with is a simple exchange of value. You need access; they provide the key. Everything else is just the squeak of the leather chair and the smell of the dry-erase marker.
We are entering an era where the “Expert” who thrives on obfuscation is becoming a liability. In an economy of speed, the person who can give you the two-column table is worth ten of the people who give you the presentation. Simplicity is becoming the ultimate luxury because it is the only thing that cannot be faked with a vest and a whiteboard.
Fixing the Hole
I still think about that “geological settling” of my garage wall. My father-in-law eventually just handed me a plunger and a mallet and told me to get to work. He didn’t care about the physics; he cared about the hole. Most IT problems are like that hole. You don’t need a lecture on the properties of drywall; you need a patch and some paint. You need the licenses to work so the users can connect so the business can move.
The next time you find yourself in a meeting where the explanation feels like it’s being intentionally stretched like salt-water taffy, ask yourself if you’re paying for the solution or the show. Most of the time, the solution is already sitting there on the table, waiting for the actors to leave the stage so it can finally be used.
The invoice serves as a receipt for the theater rather than a price for the table.
When the theater ends, you’re left with the reality of the hardware and the humans using it. That’s the space where real work happens. It’s the space where a direct, no-nonsense procurement of RDS CALs becomes a competitive advantage.
While your competitors are still in hour three of a “strategic licensing alignment workshop,” you’ve already sent the login credentials to your new remote team. You’ve traded the performance for the result. And in the end, the result is the only thing that shows up on the balance sheet. Everything else is just expensive noise.
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