Technet Subscriptions Retirement

This morning I received an email that had a subject like this: “Technet Subscriptions Retirement”. I was a little bit shocked as I looked at it.

Then I looked at the anouncement on the technet homepage somewhat puzzled: http://technet.microsoft.com/subscriptions/default.aspx

What was that all about? As an IT Pro I was using this subscription for testing purposes (vm) and access to some resources like MS Dart, AGPM, etc and there were a bunch of other products that weren’t available as normal free/trial downloads.

And what now?! Am I going to reinstall every 150 days my vm just to use them? What?! Or buy full license only for testing? WTF!

So I’ve decided to talk to a costumer support. The guy pointed me out to this: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/subscriptions/buy/buy.aspx

So the option to the previous benefits would be the product MSDN Operating Systems which costs 699$; that’s almost 3 times the cost for a Standard Technet Subscription.

Well, that seems like a move to get rid of a product that was at a very good price for any IT Pro. Who knows to what else.

I can’t say I’m happy, yet my subscription expires next year on 24 Feb so I have plenty of time to think about this.

As for me, I see the later development of products at MS is only to maximize profit with no regards to the user well beiing.

Why do I say that. I’ll tell the story about how you activate Office 2013 later.

The story is so stupid that it’s funny.