Disclaimer: Not speaking in any official PR capacity here. Just sharing my personal opinions as a guy who has been in a bunch of cross-team meetings.
I've been working as a developer in Redmond in "Server & Tools", now called "Server & Cloud", for the better part of a year now. I know for a fact there are teams that work to address piracy, but I personally haven't seen it as a driving force in specific goals.
Without wanting to give away key strategy (not that I even know much) Look at how the company is structured and where the revenue comes from. Our division serves primarily enterprise customers. Enterprise customers are totally loving the cloud and are the primary driver of this demand. So we're focused on delivering a first-rate cloud platform (Azure) and first-rate developer tools (e.g. VS 2013 and cross platform Azure libs) to develop for it.
It seems to be working, our deployments are growing steadily. Public reports claim that we are deploying semicustom data center capacity in markets that impose some localized requirements.
Look at the investment in infrastructure capacity being made here. Such a fundamental shift wouldn't make sense (to me) for the goal of reducing the number of over-deployed licenses, when that could probably instead be addressed with far cheaper (even if annoying) DRM-like solutions.
So again, our customers told us they want cloud, so we're going to build them the best darn cloud ever, not forgetting our experience with their particular needs and requirements.
I've been working as a developer in Redmond in "Server & Tools", now called "Server & Cloud", for the better part of a year now. I know for a fact there are teams that work to address piracy, but I personally haven't seen it as a driving force in specific goals.
Without wanting to give away key strategy (not that I even know much) Look at how the company is structured and where the revenue comes from. Our division serves primarily enterprise customers. Enterprise customers are totally loving the cloud and are the primary driver of this demand. So we're focused on delivering a first-rate cloud platform (Azure) and first-rate developer tools (e.g. VS 2013 and cross platform Azure libs) to develop for it.
It seems to be working, our deployments are growing steadily. Public reports claim that we are deploying semicustom data center capacity in markets that impose some localized requirements.
Look at the investment in infrastructure capacity being made here. Such a fundamental shift wouldn't make sense (to me) for the goal of reducing the number of over-deployed licenses, when that could probably instead be addressed with far cheaper (even if annoying) DRM-like solutions.
So again, our customers told us they want cloud, so we're going to build them the best darn cloud ever, not forgetting our experience with their particular needs and requirements.