Yet, MSDN remains. However it's $5K+ to buy an anonymous subscription. The fact that they're keeping Action Pack, Bizspark, the Academic options etc. seems to indicate that they're happy to keep providing cheap/free software to people - it's just that you need to jump through some hoops to get it (aka you can't easily get 1000 copies to abuse)
Personally, I think it sucks (as it impacts me as much as it does you now that I don't work for a major partner nor am I an MVP anymore), but I can see why they do it. Cheers Ken From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of James Rankin Sent: Thursday, 3 April 2014 9:13 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] Start Menu returns That's a fair point, but I'm more inclined to think having admins the world over with the ability to deploy, test and familiarize themselves with MS products for a reasonable price cuts into their mission to move the whole world to Azure and Cloud OS. Microsoft's greatest promoters - sysadmins - have now effectively become their competition. I've no doubt the abuse of TechNet subs was also a contributory factor though. Cheers, JR On 3 April 2014 11:07, Ken Schaefer <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: They won't bring back Technet because it was being abused (where do you think all those $10 copies of Windows and Office where being sold via?). Those dodgy websites would buy up thousands of Technet subscriptions, and then sell the MAK enabled products for next to nothing. Microsoft first tried restricting the keys (remember when you could get 500 activations out of a single Technet MAK key, and it went down to 10?) As for the Start Menu - surely there must have been people in Microsoft with 24"+ screens, and running a metro app taking up the whole screen was just stupid. I'm guessing this was supposed to be there all along, but never made the first cut of the code. It's like Vista all over again - takes a couple of years to get everything smoothed out. Cheers Ken From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] On Behalf Of James Rankin Sent: Thursday, 3 April 2014 7:27 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [NTSysADM] Start Menu returns So the Start Menu is coming back to Windows 8! Is this a new direction from MS, actually listening to what certain subsets of users want? If it is, then I'm impressed. I doubt very much they will bring TechNet back to us also though....I think that interferes too much with what they're hoping to do with Cloud OS. My 2 cents. -- James Rankin --------------------- RCL - Senior Technical Consultant (ACA, CCA, MCTS) | The Virtualization Practice Analyst - Desktop Virtualization http://appsensebigot.blogspot.co.uk
