

Microsoft is retiring TechNet subscriptions - miles
http://technet.microsoft.com/subscriptions/ms772427

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ckozlowski
I'm rather saddened by this.

As an infrastructure engineer, TechNet has been perfect for building demo labs
and proof-of-concepts. In my home virtualization environment, I love the
ability to throw up a domain today, a SQL cluster tomorrow, wipe it all out
the next day and build it all back up again.

Losing that flexibility will be rough. Getting eval keys from say, VMware,
with their 30-60 day timers means picking and choosing what I want to try
playing with when, and feeling SOL if some interruption comes about in which
I'm not able to use the time to the fullest. I'm pressured to their schedule,
and not my own, and damned if I want to revisit something or simply learn at
my own pace.

It was a great way to simply buy into the Microsoft ecosystem and familiarize
ones self with a whole range of products with no fuss. MSDN is a much more
expensive proposition, and while ideal for the development community, not
geared for those of us who's experience is in deploying solutions and
performing integration.

I suspect this was a move to help close a loophole in which technet licenses
were used in production environment, and that's a fair assertion to make. But
being forced to eval in a sterile "Free Lab" is no substitute. I really think
this is a unnecessary move to close what has been one of Microsoft's best
programs at promoting adoption.

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toyg
Same here. Today, I can build a test image with version X of software Y in
preparation for an engagement, then archive the image; 18 months later, when
customers come back with an issue, I can fire up that image and figure out
fairly quickly what "fabulous customization" they've done that broke my setup.

In the cloud, this exercise would likely cost me $$$ every month, since I'd
have to keep around hundreds of GB of virtual volumes. Clearly I have to
rethink my workflow, or I could go back to piracy, like I used to when I was a
penniless minion.

Microsoft: finding more ways to be hated and irrelevant since 2003.

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incision
_> In the cloud, this exercise would likely cost me $$$ every month, since I'd
have to keep around hundreds of GB of virtual volumes._

Personally, I'd rather pay some cloud provider a few dozen dollars per month
to hang on to a bunch of volumes and snapshots that I can access/redeploy
trivially from anywhere than maintain all the same in my home.

~~~
toyg
I guess I'm special: most of my engagements drop me on-site without real
connectivity (even 3g is often poor).

But yeah, I see your point. As a company, we're a bit behind on the whole AWS
thing, mostly because of fear of ungodly bills at the end of the month.
Funnily enough, I'm the only one here trying to actually use it.

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incision
Not terribly surprising.

MSDN subscriptions are still around and a good option for anyone who makes a
living on via MS software.

~~~
velodrome
It's still a short-sighted move by Microsoft. People who train using this
software will find it really annoying to reload every 180 days.

If a college grad wants to learn new skills, will he/she: 1) reload the whole
stack (Server, SQL, etc) every few months or 2) not be bothered with stupid
notices and just learn Linux, OSS.

Technet was great program for learning. I am not willing to spend $6k on a
MSDN subscription for learning to use Microsoft products. Instead, I will use
this opportunity to learn more OSS software. Thanks Microsoft!

~~~
gebe
Well doesn't most IT-students qualify for a free MSDN subscription or at least
Dreamspark (which has Windows Server, SQL, VS and so on for free for any
student)? My experience with Microsoft is that they are very generous with
their software in regards to students since they have a lot to gain and really
nothing to lose by letting soon-to-be-professional-developers get comfortable
with their stack.

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rmk2
You don't even have to be an IT-student to qualify for Dreamspark, the only
thing that matters is whether your university is a member.

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McGlockenshire
Okay, I could get used to the whole time-limited eval thing, but the real
killer here is removing the back catalog. It's going to be even harder to do
comparability testing now.

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josteink
You still have time to download the shitload (it should only be a 2-3 digit
amount of gigabytes if you only pick the stuff you actually need) and generate
enough keys to get by once the service closes down.

That said, I have to agree. Where else in this world can you get MS-DOS 6.22
and Windows For Workgroups 3.11 these days?

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zokier
> That said, I have to agree. Where else in this world can you get MS-DOS 6.22
> and Windows For Workgroups 3.11 these days?

I hope some enterprising fellow would archive significant portion of what is
available from TechNet. It might be the last moment many of the software there
is available for public.

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venomsnake
That actually makes sense. Developers developers developers in no longer the
MS mantra. Visual Studio is stagnating, Servers are very cheap for evaluation
on Azure and with the majority of the toolchains being open source there is
non trivial amount of developers using mainly linux.

So the world now is not the world technet was created.

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chokolad
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers - use MSDN, not TechNet.

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zokier
MSDN seems significantly more expensive than what I remember TechNet being,
$1200 if you need SQL server, $6200(!) if you need Office. And WTF are "Tech
support incidents"? Are they billing for bug reports?

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yuhong
They generally refund if they confirm that it is a real bug.

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AjithAntony
You would need an MSDN Premium subscription to get access to all the Operating
systems.

There is a new "MSDN Operating Systems" subscription
[http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/productI...](http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/productID.254639900)

~~~
toyg
That's a whopping 400% increase from my Technet sub.

EDIT: and of course it doesn't include SQL Server.

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wluu
A little sad to hear.

I've been a TechNet subscriber for a number of years now. I probably don't
utilise it as much as I could.

