Microsoft To Shut Down TechNet Subscription Service

otaku244 writes "Since 1998, Microsoft TechNet has been a mainstay for all system developers attached to the Microsoft platform, given the ease of access to almost every product the company has produced. Unfortunately, the days of a cheap, unlimited Microsoft development stack are coming to an end."

Comments

Re:A monumentally bad idea

[bill_mcgonigle]

This has got be the third dumbest idea Microsoft has had in the last decade

Hey, as someone who competes against proprietary solutions (including Microsoft) with Free Software solutions, I wholeheartedly endorse this change!

What I frequently see is businesses that hire a developer to code a solution, and that developer has Technet, so he chooses whatever technology he thinks is best on there, and then when the customer gets ready to deploy it, they find a chain of Microsoft dependencies that all need licensing and CAL's, and often get roped into a software maintenance agreement for 5+digits over their initial cost estimate. Often it gets big enough to require new hardware and a virtualization solution too.

I get "second-opinion" work from them, but it's often too late to do anything else. I've heard of some (that I don't work with) who 'just get Technet' too.

If there's a silver lining, it's that I often get first-crack at the next project. But either way, this is a great decision on Microsoft's part as far as I'm concerned!