While you're in it.
Then you leave it and start to try to scale out that Windows/.NET/SQL Server/App Fabric deploy you've built, and the expenses start to become very real.
It still takes us weeks to get a hotfix for something yet if they think we owe them something, it's instant audit.
It's bloody depressing really: products are going to shit, prices rising, support declining and we're treated like criminals.
That's where you BizSpark customers are going to be the moment it expires. You have been warned.
Quite frankly, i'm calling BS.
"Simple" scenarios like maintaining a warm replicated data center becomes a ridiculous exercise of license guessing, where every Microsoft rep tells you something different. Licensing newer instances of Sharepoint is simply a riot.
I'm not saying there aren't advantages, but it's nice as platform and system architects to plan out hardware and software and be done with it, and not get distracted for months discussing exactly which stack of licenses you need from Microsoft.
Or you could just ignore it and hope they don't come knocking. BizSpark is actually a great example where Microsoft encourages that -- the graduation benefits are in many ways incredibly vague (not to mention that the program duration and benefits are changing constantly). Right now when you graduate you get-
up to 4 Windows Servers (Standard Edition) and 2 SQL Servers (Standard Edition)
What does that mean? Per user/device copies of SQL Server, because that would be completely useless to any company serving the internet in any way. Two core copies, because again that's laughably anemic. What does it mean?
Yet almost no one actually talks about what it means because who cares, right? Until the day that the BSA comes knocking because a disgruntled former employee left a tip.
As a simple example: If I understand correctly, BizSpark lets you install a couple of copies of Office and use it for regular word processing tasks within your startup. However, you cannot install the BizSpark Windows 8 desktop license -- those are only for testing and development. I think. There's no indication of any restrictions on the license key download page.
HyperV is years too late. We've had VMware since 1998 and Xen, KVM etc for years as well.
PowerShell - Shit crock from end to end. It's a rotten mess of an over-complicated, inconsistent environment that barely works and performs abysmally at the best of times. They can't even get the story straight on dates. Half of it is UTC and half local time and when you mix, boom!
Desired State Config - We had this 20 years ago on Sun machines, plus it doesn't work very well and is not holistic.
VS2012 - Yeah a little better but still crashes 5 times a day with HRESULT errors and throws your workflow out of the window.
Exchange - "when deployed correctly". Enough said.
What! We get fuck all support. 30 support credits a year which we use up in a month and have to wait 6 months plus for a solution in most cases!
Have you ever tried to decipher microsoft licensing? Probably not - it's a rats nest that means you're always guilty of something.
We can't move to Azure - we have financial, insurance and healthcare clients. None of them want Azure.
I think you're looking through some rose-tinted glasses there.
Personally, it's the license compliance overhead more than the fees that drives me nuts about Microsoft. They make it hard to give them money.