| This is a surprising move, won't it result in a large drop in their MSDN subscriber base? I may be wrong here, but as far as I can tell, the only reason to maintain an MSDN subscription for the purposes of Visual Studio (assuming you're eligible to use Visual Studio Community 2013) is if you want the features in editions beyond Professional, you want to be on the bleeding edge, or you want the peripheral perks of subscribing. Personally I think it's a fantastic decision, I'm just surprised Microsoft is actually doing it. Hopefully they will be timely in releasing a Community edition for future versions of Visual Studio. Also, this move is pretty great for startups. I think it also puts BizSpark in a better position. Most early stage startups will no longer have to jump through hoops trying to get into BizSpark, nor prematurely start the clock ticking on that until they're ready. One of my major peeves with BizSpark has been the requirement that your company's public-facing site be more than just a "Coming Soon" page. While I can see the reasoning, it's kind of annoying when you haven't launched yet, you'd prefer to focus on your product, and you want to make said site using Visual Studio anyways. |
Want to try out or develop against any piece of MS software, just download it from the MSDN portal and off you go. Want to test out provisioning with Azure or fire up a server to test or dev against, just use your Azure credits. You can happily run a couple of small servers with the Azure credits.
If you just want Visual Studio you could always buy it on its own for much less than a subscription.