

Microsoft DreamSpark:  Free Dev licenses for students - iamelgringo
http://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx

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yason
Haven't they always provided free licenses for students but this single hub
site is new? Or was the earlier offer the student pricing only? Can't
remember. But it doesn't matter really.

What is interesting is that over the year I've begun to repeatedly see signs
of that Microsoft is no more. This is just another one of those.

While I've been passively against Microsoft ever since 80's I've always
considered them a credible opposing force to other stacks of software, such as
FOSS or GNU, or Unix, or Macs. Eventhough I wasn't a Windows user I always
knew what was new on the MS front, and what new features they would soon be
selling.

However, these days I hardly bother to raise my eyebrow anytime Microsoft
announces something. I think it started with, or at around the time of, the
anticipation of Vista.

Vista was a bit everything and then quite much nothing: it didn't feel like a
success and, indeed, now it seems that it never became a success either. This
is not only because XP was deemed "good enough" but, to me, because Microsoft
really hadn't figured out anything relevant to add to XP. They would have
implemented it in Vista but it seems that since XP a Windows-like operating
system had already reached a saturation point, both feature-wise and UI-wise.
This means they must have stopped thinking about -- or run out of -- any juicy
practical improvements in around 2000 or so: they still had something to be
implemented in XP but then nothing much. People could run XP for a decade and
they wouldn't miss anything important as long as they could install new
versions of their browser.

Unlike Vista, Windows 7 will probably break the XP dam and flood over to
everywhere around the world. However, this doesn't mean there's much substance
to it except the sheer brute force ramming the foundations of the 8-or-9-year-
old XP. It will take a few years to change (merely the name of) the de facto
Windows operating system but as XP will begin to suffer from fundamental aging
problems such as lack of drivers the transition will punch through. However,
unless Windows 7 is a total blunder there will be absolutely nothing from
Microsoft that would replace it for the following ten years or even longer.
Microsoft has had a hard time with XP already and they now have one chance to
do one more force-update and then they're stuck. I don't think it would be
unimaginable for Windows 7 to be the last major operating system from
Microsoft.

Similarly with IE: IE8 is better in many ways and delivers features that
people have been waiting for since IE6. However, I didn't see people rejoicing
together, queueing at stores, or slashdotting Microsoft's download site. IE8
is not a key player in the web browser market: it's just catching up. There's
no disruptive energy behind IE8; people who have been fed up with IE6/IE7 have
been using Firefox for years. IE8 doesn't make the difference anymore. IE7 and
IE8 could just as well have been IE6.1 and IE6.2.

Now, the student licenses! Even no more than five years ago I would have got a
grumpy face from thinking about the horde of freshmen that would get Microsoft
stuff for free and learn to think of the world of computing as equal to MS
Windows, MS Visual Studio, MS languages, and MS tools. Now I'm not worried at
all, for some reason. I don't feel their student licenses changing anything in
the world even if they offered them for negative price. The smart guys have
been using Linux/BSD or OS X for years already, and everything important is
cross-platform or on the web these days so that there's no single Microsoft
solution that would be the de facto environment for most tasks. Perhaps I just
exclusively know and read people who I consider smart and are in the non-MS
camp, or I'm missing some other reality check here, but I'm not worrying about
this DreamSpark thing. It will take off because Microsoft is huge and a like a
tanker it takes miles to come to a full stop. But as for the bleeding edge
where new things are tried, Microsoft isn't and won't be a major player.
Rather, the DreamSpark thing feels like a one last stretch to level the
playing field to their favor, and those kind of stunts are bound to fail per
definition.

To exaggerate, Microsoft is effectively in the position as if they hadn't done
or released anything after Windows XP. Not good. (For them, I mean. :))

~~~
halo
People have been predicting Microsoft's demise for 15 years, and it hasn't
happened, and I'd even argue that Microsoft have got better in that time: IIS
has gone from being a joke to being a worthy Apache competitor, .NET is a
great technology and should be seen as a huge step forward, the security and
stability in their OSes have improved with each release (despite taking some
flack for 'overprotective' security measures for it in Vista), and they have
been making many positive usability improvements (e.g. Office 2007 and the
Vista Start Menu), DirectX has taken the crown from OpenGL for consumers and
managed to avoid standards hell, Visual Studio is extremely well regarded,
they got rid of their worst products despite it being controversial (e.g.
Visual Basic and Frontpage), and SQL Server still blows away MySQL in most
regards.

If Windows 7 is the last major operating system, then what will replace it?

Mac OS X? Apple's cheapest desktop computer is £499 excluding monitor. Good
luck selling them to the business users who traditionally buy Dells at half
the price, especially as most are using Office and Exchange Server, plus all
the custom software in their niche which is written for Windows.

Linux distributions? They're getting better, but the community is still
incredibly fractured and the infrastructure with commercial software is still
far from ideal. Dropping Adobe's products or Office for their open-source
equivalents just isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future. Perhaps when
Wine reaches parity with Windows (and I can see that time coming), but even if
that particular hurdle is overcome, from a usability perspective it's going to
take a big effort for GNOME to reach parity with Windows, let alone manage to
make enough commercial impact to overcome the familiarity that the average
Windows user has. Hell, even in terms of system administration, managing a set
of Windows machines is supposed to be much easier than a set of Linux
machines. Perhaps the difference is we're going to have a time where people
choose Windows instead of having Windows as the only choice, and that's a
positive step forward.

Oh, and while Microsoft would rather have people paying for Vista licenses, XP
licenses still means money in their pocket as well. We're still at a time when
they're primarily competing with themselves. If people use Windows 7 for a
decade, they're still getting the license fees on basically every PC unit
sold.

------
gord
All part of the lock in scheme - students have far more {interesting}
opportunities to tinker with open source, imo.

~~~
MrRage
Excuse me, but how does this "lock in" students? Once they become part of this
program they always have to use MS products?

Students should try to expose themselves to as many possible technologies as
possible. Open source, Microsoft, Apple, etc. These sorts of programs help
students do that.

~~~
catfish
Spoken like a man who has never written code...

You get locked in because after 2-3 years of churning out work you have both
comfort with one technology, and a base of libraries and routines that took
you 2-3 years to write, and know.

Once your down that rabbit hole, switching becomes much harder as you have to
abandon the mind share you created in the languages you used. And in the case
of .NET since so much of what you do there is unique to MS alone, and mostly
due to the "LOCK IN" to their OS, walking away from it is not FREE or EASY.

Worse yet stay with it long enough and watch your world crumble to nothing
when MS seeking revenue enhancement decides it needs to release the next great
language, and obsolete years of your work, with an upgrade. Don't think so?
Ask the VB 6.0 crowd and the thousands of COM component vendors whose industry
disappeared overnight when MS pulled the plug on them and forced .NET as the
standard.

I don't agree that students should expose themselves to as many technologies
as possible, if among their choices one technology could cause them harm...

------
pj
There's a similar program for startups called BizSpark.
<http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/>

~~~
rythie
Whilst we are talking about this type of thing, Sun do free software and
heavily discounted servers etc. on the Startup essentials program
<http://www.sun.com/emrkt/startupessentials/>

------
silencio
Just on a sidenote, ACM and IEEE Computer Society student members get access
to a _ton_ of free Microsoft software through MSDNAA, the same program lots of
schools participate in for low cost/free MS software, including a lot of what
is offered through DreamSpark. Something I've found out most people didn't
even know existed, but I think it's a fairly new offering. I didn't even know
some of the products available for download through there even existed.

Not condoning Microsoft or anything, but perhaps someone needs it. :)

~~~
norova
>> Not condoning Microsoft or anything, but perhaps someone needs it. :)

I really don't get why people are afraid of "condoning" Microsoft. They're one
choice in a sea of thousands; to each his own. That mentality really bothers
me.

~~~
silencio
Well I saw the sea of dead posts about this topic here before I commented - I
wasn't afraid of condoning the use of Microsoft software as much as one of
those people would then maybe comment and start off something like that for a
small comment I left in hopes that there might be someone else on HN that
might find it useful. (And now I notice that more of the comments not-dead on
this link are about Microsoft than the DreamSpark program itself...) I
personally don't care what I use as long as I can use it for the task at hand,
and I also don't care what others choose to use. I think that these tools that
are normally fairly expensive now free for academic use to be a nice little
touch, but then again I also appreciate that most commercial software is also
available at low/no cost to students and educators.

What does bother me is kneejerk reactions to being against Microsoft for no
good reason. So I use Mac OS X mainly, and *bsd or Linux for servers, and I
contribute to an open source project. I still find a use for Server 2008 and
Windows Mobile and more..

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steveis
Being knee-jerk anti-Microsoft is so 80's....

