Microsoft TechNet Subscription

» see technet.microsoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Getting hold of Microsoft software was never the difficult part. Any administrator in 2005 could have a Windows Server image inside an afternoon without paying anybody. What TechNet sold was the other thing entirely: a key that made the install legal, for effectively the whole catalog, for a year, for a couple of hundred dollars. It was a subscription to permission rather than to bits, and it is the only product in this file whose value was the paperwork.

It began as a physical object. The subscription arrived as discs published monthly, carrying the complete Microsoft Knowledge Base along with service packs, security updates, resource kits and deployment guides. In a period when a service pack ran to several hundred megabytes and the office shared one line, a box of discs in the post was not sentiment. It was the delivery mechanism, and the online TechNet the discs eventually turned into was launched in 1998.

By the end there were two tiers. Standard cost $199, or $149 to renew, and covered most of the catalog. Professional cost $349, or $249 to renew, and added the enterprise products and Dynamics along with a couple of support calls. Each product came with a small allocation of keys, and the license said evaluation only, which meant a lab you were learning on rather than a machine anybody was billing for. The software stayed usable exactly as long as you kept paying.

The part that reads foreign from Ankara is not the software, it is the transaction. Everything in that catalog was reachable here by the early 2000s on a burned disc from a shop or off a link somebody posted on a forum, and nobody at the receiving end was in a position to answer the question of which key made it legitimate. A subscription that sold compliance was priced for an organization with a budget line for compliance, which in Turkey then meant banks and telcos and very little else. As a student, the honest position was that the thing TechNet was selling was the one component of the stack nobody around me was buying.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the keys were for ~

The keys were the point and the keys were the problem. A TechNet product key was a real Microsoft product key, indistinguishable at activation from one that came in a retail box, and by the middle of the 2000s the subscription had turned into one of the more reliable supplies for people selling keys to strangers. A program built to put new software in front of administrators had become a wholesale source for the gray market, at a couple of hundred dollars a year for the raw material.

Microsoft responded in stages rather than at once. Key allocations per product were cut in 2010 and cut again in 2012, and the terms were rewritten so that the rights expired when the subscription did rather than lasting forever. When the announcement came on 1 July 2013, the company said the reason was a shift in demand toward free evaluation resources and specifically denied that it was a response to piracy. Both of those statements can be true at the same time and the sequence of events still reads the way it reads.

~ the petition ~

The reaction from the people who used it was immediate and useless. A petition asking Microsoft to keep the program went up within days and collected several thousand signatures, somewhere around 6,500 by the time it stopped moving. The argument in it was not about money. It was that you cannot learn a product you are not allowed to install, and that the free replacements on offer did not solve that: the Evaluation Center handed out timed images that expired inside six months, and a virtual academy course is not a lab.

Nothing was reversed. Sales closed on 31 August 2013 and activation of already-purchased subscriptions ran to 30 September. Contracts already in force were honored until 31 August 2014. MSDN survived, aimed at developers and priced accordingly, which for a lot of administrators meant several times the cost for access they had been getting for $349. The rest of TechNet became a documentation site, then folded into Microsoft Docs from 2016, and by January 2020 the address just redirected.

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