Well MS themselves said that it was fine for home enthusiasts to use it for personal use at home when questioned directly about it. Several people specifically called them about that several times during the Windows 7 release and then on and they always said that was fair use.
I understand, on the 7 forms, I was one of the people who actually called and asked the question to MS directly. They kept saying that, as long as I was evaluating the software, and not running a business with it, it was ok. They said it wasn't appropriate for production use, but wouldn't define what production use was. I think MS was basically saying, "yeah, instead of people pirating our software, we'd rather they paid for Techent..at least we got some money". Now, they are going to make it cheaper and hope that this lower price will be an incentive for many people to just pay and not go through the effort to pirate it.
They have since changed the agreement and are very clear on what you are intended to do with it;
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That sort of use was advantageous to them. You WANT the hard core enthusiasts to be all on board with your entire software line up. At $350 up front and $250 a year after that, that's still a LOT of money they are getting for maybe 4-5 windows installs and an office install.
Well, $350 a year was only for the pro agreement which most Technet subscribers didn't need, the standard sub was enough at $199 a year. Even at $350, for 5 installs of Ultimate OEM (which is what lots of technet users used) you would be looking at ~$200 x 5, so $1,000. And Office 2010 Professional (
Amazon.com: Microsoft Office Professional 2010 - 2PC/1User (Disc Version): Software) is $350.00 for 2 PCs...so for 4-5 PC's you would need 2 of them....even the $350 professional technet is cheap. It would have been nearly $1,700 at retail.
They then take that enthusiasm into the work force with them. It helps keep them "on top" etc. Of course people still abused it WELL beyond that (Selling off unused keys etc), but no one I know ever went that far. :/
But the problem you now run into, is that these "fans" get a skewed opinion of how much it costs to run this Microsoft software that they think is so wonderful and productive. It becomes a matter of, just toss up a new Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine and off you go. Oh, you need a 2nd or a 3rd server, ok, no big deal. Well, in the real world, these costs really do add up.
Just a week ago, we went over a software audit and it turns out that MS provides us license keys under our enterprise agreements for products we aren't actually licensed to use. But our MS fan's figured, hey, we get license keysfor Microsoft Project and Microsoft Visio so let's just use it. And heck, we get keys for the Premium editions of both, so lets just use it. And this software got installed on the business desktops. And now it's "True-UP" time, time to pay for what you are using. Yeah, Project Professional costs $1,218.54 per USER, and Visio Premium is $769.95 per USER. Ooopsie, turns out we owe Microsoft an additional $52,500 for this installed software that 1). We didn't really need in most cases or 2) Could have easily used other alternative products and accomplished the same tasks. But we went ahead and used the MS software because people under these programs figured "hey, why not, this MS stuff is really cool and it's here and why not". Needless to say the software is being uninstalled where not needed, downgraded to standard versions wherever possible, and lower cost/open source alternatives are being looked at one again for those who can use them.
