Microsoft Slash TechNet Product Keys from 10 to 5 to 3
In September 2010, citing concerns over piracy, Microsoft slashed the number of product keys available to subscribers of its TechNet service from 10 per product down to 5. This caused some arguments but Microsoft still insisted that the annual subscription of $349 was great value for what you got. Now though the company has announced that the number of available product keys is to be slashed even further to just 3 per product.
So what does this mean? Fortunately it doesn't mean that for $349 you only get three Windows product keys and three for Office. You will get three for Windows 8 Home Premium, three for Windows 8 Professional, three for Windows 8 professional Plus, three for Windows 8 Ultimate and so on. For office it's three for Office 15 Standard and three for Office 15 Professional etc. That's still excellent value for money for software that's just "for evaluation purposes". Each licence will still also do 10 activations so so that will make up 24 installations of Windows 8 which is enough for anyone to "test".
In a blog post that can only be seen by current subscribers the company said...
Beginning in mid-March 2012, subscribers to TechNet Subscriptions (excluding TechNet Standard which are entitled to 2 keys per product) may access a maximum allocation of three (3) product keys for Microsoft Office and Windows Client products in connection with their subscription. The allotted keys may only be used for software evaluation purposes. Once the maximum keys have been activated, no more keys will be made available. Additional product keys may be acquired through the purchase of an additional subscription.
There is another restriction though in that subscribers will now only be able to claim 44 keys in total in any one 24 hour period...
Reaching your limit means that you have claimed the maximum number of keys allowed for your program benefit level within a 24 hour period. Every 24 hours you may claim another set of keys, up to your program levels maximum.
So why is the company doing this? Again they say it's because of piracy concerns...
Why has Microsoft limited my access to product keys?
We are acting to protect the value of your subscription. If we did not act to prevent abuse of subscriptions we would eventually have to either limit the products available in a subscription or raise the price of your subscription. We believe that this is the best compromise to continue to deliver the highest value to you while limiting abuse at the same time.
Some people might turn off TechNet now or perhaps take up a pricier MSDN subscription instead, though the question now needs to be asked how long it will talk for Microsoft to reduce the number of MSDN keys as well.
It's a blow to existing subscribers, especially to long-time subscribers such as myself who need to be able to test different hardware configurations, dual boot systems and virtual machine environments. For those however there are the trial versions of Windows and Office. Office 2010 has a 60-day trial verstion and hopefully this will continue with Office 15. Windows 7 also offers a 30 day trial version and we can only hope that Windows 8 does to. This will help circumvate some of the issues regards fewer keys being available from TechNet.
It just seems a pity though that the move isn't coming with a price reduction but never mind :/
Are these articles AI generated?
Now the duplicates are more obvious.
This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.
Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro
Why oh why?
Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?
Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.
Special event by they is a special crap for us.
If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
Better brands at better prices elsewhere.
All new articles have zero count comments. :S
WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage
I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one
Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.
What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?
Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.
I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.
And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?
Nope, just charge the customer twice.
Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.
When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?
Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.
For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
unquote
so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.
>”Now You: what is your theory?”
That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.
Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.
Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.
The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.