Now there’s a bold way to start a blog entry aimed at programmers. You can complain all you like about monopolies, bugs, security & performance. But then, Microsoft probably didn’t just give you $10,000K worth of software practically for free, so you’ll have to forgive my temporary rush of enthusiasm…
So basically the deal is that Microsoft have a partners scheme, where just about anyone can sign up. If you’re a partner, you are eligible to register for the Microsoft Action Pack, which is a big goody bag of software. You get a nice folder and a big stack of CDs shipped to you, and then a quarterly update of any new version released in the following year.
You can see the full list here but there is a lot of stuff I’ve never heard of so let me give you my highlights, i.e the software I’d actually want:
- Windows Vista Business (32 & 64 bit versions) X 10 licenses
- Office 2007 Enterprise Edition X 10 licenses
- MS Project X 10 licenses
- MS Visio X 10 licenses
- Windows Server 2003 (32 & 64 bit versions)
- Windows Small Business Server
- SQL Server 2005
And next year, I will get full versions of Windows Server 2008 amongst others.
If you’ve never thought how much server software costs, i suggest you take a look. You might have been thinking 10 Vista licenses was worth a lot… not compared to Windows 2003 or SQL Server 2005!
If you’d like to post how much it would cost you for all this where you live, that would be cool. But how much did I pay? Well, for all that software, on actual CDs, delivered to my door from the US, I paid a little under… $500US.
Neat, eh?
December 6, 2007 at 12:58 pm |
[...] 10 licenses; Windows Server 2003 (32 & 64 bit versions); Windows Small Business Server … http://d000hg.wordpress.com/2007/12/05/microsoft-rock/ d000hg [...]
December 12, 2007 at 8:13 am |
As Iran doesn’t have relations with USA, one can obtain all of these software for free
I, myself, like to use open-source tools rather than MS software.
Although I bough a Win XP License with my Dell Laptop ($60 for XP License? I don’t remember)
December 12, 2007 at 9:14 am |
I don’t have any problems with either open-source or commercial software. I would rather use whatever is the best tool I can afford – for instance I choose to use Eclipse for Java because it is a really good IDE. However people you work with often assume you have MSOffice and while OSS like OpenOffice is OK, it does still cause issues.
February 21, 2008 at 5:23 pm |
Surely you meant $10,000 not $10,000K ($10,000,000)