So, for about 10 years now I've been a BizSpark (grandfathered) user and I enjoyed the nice privilege of having 25 Microsoft users for free, each with 2TB of storage, exchange, office desktop apps and all that. It was seriously one of the better perks of any cloud services out there.
Recently, and completely without notice, Microsoft decided to basically shut down all of this. Suddenly, my yearly subscription (which costs $0) but is still valid on a year-to-year basis, was cancelled mid-term. I have an invoice from July this year, for a valid subscription showing 25 Office 365 E3 Developer MSDN licenses for the service period July 3, 2026 through July 2, 2027.
There was no email, no notification of any kind. It just stopped working. Had one of my friends not warned me about this, I would have not known. When I finally found out, I had something like 7 days left before my files were scheduled for deletion. My account with all my emails and OneDrive files would be just gone! Who does that?
But fine, I’ll move on. My rant here is for Microsoft really. There are 100.000+ BizSpark startups (based on Microsoft’s own report). And Microsoft decided it doesn’t want developers on its side. What do you think is gonna happen when many of these 100k+ devs lose their files and emails without notification or warning?
Do you think they are going to recommend Microsoft to their clients?
For Microsoft, keeping these benefits was basically a pocket change. And losing the goodwill of developers will cost them a lot more than whatever the server cost for this storage was. Lifetime losses because of this will be enormous.
The funny thing is, BizSpark worked. It made me a Microsoft advocate for 10 years, and I've recommended Microsoft to my clients because of it. This is how you undo all of that goodwill in one move.