Directly contrary to the thesis of the article: Microsoft is absurdly generous with software licenses if you're going to build on their stack. Even without getting a deal from the inside, you can get on their e.g. BizSpark program, which gets you essentially every software product made by Microsoft for free for three years.
You're right it is absurd -- to think it's generosity. Whilst most development stacks these days are free in-beer-and-use for life - Microsoft gives you unlimited access to try out all their wares hoping you get hooked on as much of it as possible so when the 3 year is up, you're up for the lump some of your IT development infrastructure. It's a lot harder to move off a platform once you're hooked on it so by doing this Microsoft expects a life-long re-occurring income as your infrastructure upgrades and grows.
This 3 year "absurd generosity" is nothing more than a classic bait and switch Marketing strategy - although it does have the pleasant side-effect of not immediately obvious, and is sometimes mistaken for generosity.
By the time your biz has been developing for Windows for 3 years you should be able to afford the tools. It's not bait-and-switch, it's helping customers use a product to make money with which they can pay for the product - more a "pay only if it works for you" model. Fair enough.
> It's not bait-and-switch, it's helping customers use a product
It's only helping customers choose their product and "3 years free!" makes the MS Stack look like a better choice than it really is against the "really is free for life" stacks. This all happens at the most critical time for a business - when stakeholders decide what platform they're going to adopt.
Meanwhile whilst your busy building your business on their stack MS is free to raise their prices - and SQL Server is amongst the most expensive licences and hosting there is, which has recently seen liberal price increases - whilst at the same time offering a sweet migration path to their expensive subscription-in-the-sky services (aka Azure).
So do you feel the same way about Basecamp or ZenDesk or Salesforce offering 30-day free trials?
They also have the ability to crank up the price whenever they feel like it. They're also offering their product 'for free' at the most critical time for a business - when deciding what product to use.
The only way what you say makes sense is if people buying into the program are dumb enough or ill-informed enough to not know that there are open-source alternatives available for what they want to do.
But no one is confusing their free-trials as anything other than a marketing strategy to maintain a low barrier to entry to get more people to first try then use their product.
i.e. I've never heard anyone say SalesForce is absurdly generous because of their free trials.
> By the time your biz has been developing for Windows for 3 years you should be able to afford the tools
The point is that with their competition, customers are never required to afford the tools.
> it's helping customers use a product to make money with which they can pay for the product
Again, it's helping customers into a position they'll need to be customers in the future, if they have a future. If they don't, why would Microsoft care?
Do you know anybody who got "hooked" or "baited" this way? Or is this just your impression looking at it from the outside?
One datapoint: I've been developing on the MS stack for a little over 15 years, paying for my own tools. I've never paid anything close to full price for any of it.
Patricks's assessment of reality is a lot closer to the mark than yours. Microsoft really does want developers for their platform more than they want developers' money. All their stuff has price tags, but they lots of people on their payroll whose only job in life is to make sure nobody pays the price listed on those tags.
This 3 year "absurd generosity" is nothing more than a classic bait and switch Marketing strategy
As someone who is currently enjoying the benefits of BizSpark, you're completely wrong.
Your sense of entitlement is simply amazing. I write software, and I charge for it. I would never expect a package as complex and high quality as Visual Studio to be free. The fact that I can use it for free for three years is fantastic, and I'm grateful for it.
http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/
The only requirements are you have to be working on the MS stack, privately held, and making less than a million bucks.