Will Microsoft employees receive free Microsoft software?

 

Do Microsoft employees get free Microsoft software?

Yes. In most cases, Microsoft employees get to use Microsoft softwares for free.

The company has certain policy around it but a simplified takeaway is: as long as the Microsoft software is not used to make money and is used by the employee himself, no matter at work or at home, on work machines or on home machines, for business propose or personal use, the employee doesn't have to pay for the software.

Examples:

# Windows is free to employees. You can bring your personal laptops to office and install Windows from corpnet. You can get a key from an internal IT site and use that to activate the Windows. There is a cap on the max number of keys every employee can request, though. I have never hit the cap, btw.

# Same to Office. Just bring your machine to office and install from intranet. You can also VPN from home to corpnet and install it to home machine.

# Visual Studio is free. All SKUs, including the Ultimate.

# SQL Server is free.

# Other server products like Sharepoint, Exchange, etc. If you were to build your own personal site using Sharepoint, you don't have to pay for the software -- it's just that few people are hosting Sharepoint and Exchange outside of office for their personal use.

# Employee gets MSDN subscription for free. You can download Windows and other softwares from MSDN subscription, along with the activation key. MSDN subscription also gives an Azure subscription for free (with some monetary cap),
 
#Employee can get internal consumption Azure subscription. All cost on the subscription goes to your cost center (meaning: your department pays for it). There is no monetary cap on such subscriptions, though the subscription itself is subject to a common quota, such as no more than N cores for virtual machines. As far as I remember, N is probably 350 (maybe less).

# Under the internal consumption Azure subscription, employees get unlimited hours of build time in Visual Studio Online.

Exceptions:

# Games are not free. Including PC games (e.g. Flight Simulation) and XBox games.
# Some less widely used softwares, such as Streets and Trips (discontinued).
# Office for Mac. People who write products for Mac get those for free. But not everybody.


But some of the games made by Microsoft can be bought from company store for a quite deep discount. But you can't resale it. There were people reselling Windows they bought from company store and got into jail.


Disclosure and credibility: Eric Zheng he  have worked in Microsoft for 13 years.

Thanks for your time Mr. Eric Zheng.

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