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.
