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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."
Visual Studio and other products have free versions now, so TechNet subscription is mostly outdated service. Visual Studio Express is the same great product that the full version of Visual Studio is, but is great for beginners. Visual Studio as a whole is a great product too. And, MSDN subscription is there too.
Combine that with subscription based Office and you have little reason to get TechNet.
This has got be the third dumbest idea Microsoft has had in the last decade (Windows 8.0 and the f*cking the start button in Windows 8.1 being the first two). Microsoft Technet was a relatively cheap way for people that made a career out of Microsoft products to get their products for a reasonable price.
This allowed for two very important things, first it allowed for the ecosystem to be license compliant which made it easier to stay in the habit of being license compliant while at work work. The second thing it did was allow workers exposure to products to gain access for skills development. Workers that have exposure to products tends to push for the products that they are familiar with at work.
It's all about the ecosystem, and TechNet was absolutely brilliant for supporting the ecosystem of workers that support their products in the work place. Sure, you can follow their suggestion to switch over to the much more expensive MSDN subscription, but for most workers that is simply too expensive for a personal salary. Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot for exploitation of the very people the very workers that make their success possible to begin with in the first place.
Technet was very reasonably priced at a couple hundred bucks a year and that got you access to almost everything Microsoft makes. Of course, you couldn't use it for production, but for testing, etc it was great. As a sysadmin, I don't want to pay 5-10x as much for an MSDN subscription because I just want the software, I could care less about the development stuff.
So at the end of the day, what Microsoft will see is less money from me when I turn to other sources to get the MS software I need for testing purposes. I know guys at other companies with MSDN universal subscriptions and they're happy to share their login info.
For an annual subscription fee of a few hundred dollars, subscribers get the right to download virtually all of the desktop and server software Microsoft sells, with multiple product keys. The software is licensed for evaluation purposes only, but that restriction is part of the license agreement and not enforced in the software itself.
Could it be they're trying to cut pirating / abuse as a business entity to raise license sales? Nah, it's a conspiracy to spite the users.. ya that's it.
"Developers! Developers! Developers!" I guess that with their obsession of trying to be everything Apple, they've decided to abandon everything that made Microsoft successful. Is the management team just panicking and throwing crap at the wall to see what sticks?
Rod Trent over at http://windowsitpro.com/windows/dead-microsoft-technet speculates on the TechNet shutdown that "...in a Cloud world, this makes a lot of sense. Those wanting to test new software can simply spin-up a Microsoft Azure-hosted VM, completely configured for the application they want to try-out or through the use of TechNet Virtual Labs. These days, using Microsoft Azure, a testing lab can be setup and running in minutes with just a mouse click."
Plausible, but risky if/when devs don't like it.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Microsoft doesn't want to be bothered with the OS or the language platform anymore. Not enough long term profit in it. They want to be a sort of Cloud/HP/Apple. They want to be a smartphone/tablet and internet based business services vendor and that's it. There's apparently just not enough profit in the OS or supporting application developers.
It's clear that this is what Ballmer is thinking (he's recently on record as saying that he wants MS to become a "device and services company"), but it really doesn't make any damn sense.
When it comes to cloud services and portable devices, MS is actually pretty late to the game, with nothing particularly special to offer. And their brand name is actually a negative – even people who like MS products often don't like their business practices, and many people only use MS because they more or less have to.
I use Windows at home because it's what I am used to (I've been using it since Win95), and because some of the software I want to run is only available for Windows. My workplace uses Windows, Office, and a variety of other MS technologies in part because it's an industry standard, but also largely because of legacy lock-in: much of the third-party software we use is Windows-only, we have to work with existing Office documents all the time, and all our existing processes and procedures are based around Windows/Office.
The desktop (and associated IT functions related to the desktop) is the one area where Microsoft has a real competitive advantage that will be very hard for anyone else to erode. Yet they seem blithely willing to ignore it, throw it away, in favor of moving to new lines of business where existing competition is fierce and they don't bring anything new to the table. It doesn't make any damn sense, and if the stockholders cared about the long-term viability of the company, they'd pitch Ballmer (and his chair) out the window right now.
As an MCT, I get the TechNet subscription as part of my annual fees. Probably the most valuable benifit of the MCT program. Since I'm not really doing much with MSFT training these days, having much more fun with Linux and Open Source stuff, I've been debating weather or not to keep my MSFT certifications going. I stopped doing all the Novell certification crap back in the '90s as they became less and less relevant. I'm thinking this is just more MSFT not being able to figure out how to play in today's environment. I guess I'm done with Microsoft now.