I agree that the SQL Server license model is badly designed, and I would much prefer a model based around capacity rather than features. Also the 'virtualisation tax' of Software Assurance being needed to run SQL Server in the cloud is almost insulting.

SQL 2014 has some great new features, such as updatable column-store indexes and in-memory tables. But to fully exploit these Enterprise Edition is needed.

Compare SQL 2014 to AWS Redshift. This already has much the same BI feature set as SQL 2014, but pricing starts at $1000 per year (albeit for an environment almost too small to do useful work), and scales up roughly linearly to 32 cores and 128GB memory.

For a business with only about 3TB of data SQL Enterprise Edition is no longer competitive, when compared to Cloud offerings. We will no doubt continue to use SQL Server for a number of years, but our license needs peaked late in 2012 and will now go down year on year.

Moving to a different DBMS is not a trivial matter, which is why SQL will stay a part of our infrastructure, but what now gets developed for a different DBMS is unlikely to ever get ported to SQL Server.

By the time Microsoft feels the pinch, it will be because businesses have already left SQL Server behind. In some ways this is sad, but in others it means opportunities to learn new things and have a career for as long as it is needed.