What is meant by "dropped within your TechNet Serials" and why 'most'....not 'all'? If that's word for word what they said, then I suspect that person was hedging their bets. I feel we are going to be hearing a lot more about this in the days and weeks ahead. It's getting very bad press internationally.
I agree Ex,
I have been a member for over 15 years with TechNet and also MSDN Services, and also I have some Stocks with Microsoft and its not looking too well within the last 12 to 6 month period...
It looks to me that Microsoft is slowly losing their drive and power within the IT market, as it has been talked about for a few years now and time will tell... where Microsoft will be heading from this point forward in the future...
Ex, keep your eyes open and read the reports on Google Corp, Google will be bringing out some new PC Operating systems by the end of this year and from here onward in 2014
Hi there
I agree with MOST of the post -- apart from the bit of Ms Stock which really is fine --it's at the top ends of its 52 week range (unlike AAPL) and that's in these turbulent market times.
I don't think the keys will be blacklisted when TechNet finally disappears -- why should they -- doesn't actually make sense -- most of the stuff people download from TECHNET are things like OFFICE 2010 / 2007 / 2013 which is being moved over to cloud / subscription services (Office 365) or older Windows OS'es such as Windows 7 and Windows XP.
What I tend to use TECHNET for are to test and LEARN SERVERS (like W2k3, W2008 server and now W2012 R2 server) -- these products are far too expensive for typical individual Home users who want to learn this stuff and haven't the time or corporate sponsor to go on MS training courses.
However downloading FREE 180 day trials will be fine by me -- but knowing Ms I can see the period of free evaluation downloads being shortened to say 30 days -- this is often just TOO short if you can't devote a lot of time to testing / learning - especially when its in your own time after work / weekends etc.
I do believe though that the actual usefulness of TechNet isn't that great any more -- I'll be able to get the latest W8 version via my subscription (Enterprise version) - and really I can't see the growth of "Classical OS'es " expanding much more in any case so Ms is probably right in shutting the service.
I do suspect that Piracy played a much larger role than Ms will admit to -- that was probably because they were hugely overgenerous with giving people 10 keys at the start (trhese keys were also multiple activatable) so you could essentially have 1000 activations for Windows XP for instance.
I shall garner my last crop of what I need and then I don't really think I'll miss it too much in the future - although it was GREAT in the past - I learned all sorts of things using TECHNET software that I couldn't have hoped to get on my own.
The whole era of Windows is changing in any case -- It will be interesting to see how Android for desktop devices comes along (can already be run as a VM even now) and there's a lot of sense mow in going back to LINUX while just using the Windows stuff you need (Office for example) on a small dedicated Windows Virtual Machine. With this installed on an SSD performance of the VM is almost at Native speed and you can "CLONE" the VM as many times as you like so quite useful for testing - without running into the Keys problem.
I'm typing this from a W7 VM running under Linux and it's working fine.
So R.I.P TechNet -- great while it was there but time to move on now.
Cheers
jimbo