Microsoft is retiring TechNet subscriptions
technet.microsoft.com
technet.microsoft.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
I realize this is probably a bit unique compared to most, but a lot of what I do in my instance is build private clouds for customers. AWS is great, but their infrastructure is already built; its the end stage at which most of the heavy lifting has already been done. The deployments are automated and the work has been done for you already. This is great is you're a developer and you don't have time to worry about all of the backend nonsense, you need an infrastructure and you need to start on your application/web frontend/whatever right now.
Regardless of where you're hosting it though, losing access to the MS library is going to be a heavy blow.
MSDN subscriptions are still around and a good option for anyone who makes a living on via MS software.
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!
Or...
3) Spin the stuff up on EC2 as needed and likely spend less than the TechNet sub + power.
While I'm sure there are exceptions, my anecdotal experience says the typical TechNet subscriber wasn't in it to "learn new skills" they were directly or indirectly selling keys. This is surely why MS went through several rounds of reducing key allowances prior to this.
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.
So the world now is not the world technet was created.
Edit: Nevermind. The OS subscription doesn't include the server software like SQL and exchange.
With Microsoft's otherwise very hard push on Azure these days, it's hard to read this as anything else than further trying to push the infrastructure-people away from on-premise hosted solutions to their cloud-platform where they can collect an continuous, annual fee instead of a one-time price.
Which is completely fair, but I can see how some people will fail to appreciate it.
There is a new "MSDN Operating Systems" subscription http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/productI...
EDIT: and of course it doesn't include SQL Server.
I've been a TechNet subscriber for a number of years now. I probably don't utilise it as much as I could.