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?
