https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
Must be really getting out of hand if he's mentioning it as a higher priority than even his AI blitz. Well, bless Satya's heart. Somebody should clue him in that not dismantling the QA orgs would have helped with security and quality. Just sayin'.
The offices were nice though. Back in the early days, it didn't take that much seniority to get a single person office and a little more to get an office with a window.
That wasn't a traditional layoff - it was a reimagining of the development process and the elimination of SDET which was overwhelmingly a good thing - I also joined in 2009, and SDET was an utter disaster. All the good SDETs got out of that job - either to SDE at Microsoft or to SDE at another company. Those that were left were largely a waste of money, and the entire culture of "this person writes the code, this person writes the tests" meant that a lot of devs got high recognition and rewards for writing untestable unmaintainable garbage that someone else had to try to cover.
Whenever it comes up among my co-workers as a Microsoft product falls on its face yet again, most recently MS Project Online screwing up something as simple as completion percentages during a meeting, I just sigh and quip "Maybe Microsoft ought to consider hiring a QA department."
The first modern thing like this that I can recall is the 2011 Android-based Motorola Atrix phone[1] that presented a DeX-like desktop (well before DeX!).
It used an Ubuntu-based desktop. It was really, really good, but never got traction.
The BigTech firms have been doing this intentionally for a very long time. I started hearing about Microsoft doing the security-escorts-you-straight-out-the-door all the way back in 2012.
It's not that they are bad at this, it's that they think the trade-off works out in their favour. And it probably does - what's a few but-hurt former employees, versus one disgruntled former employee who had enough warning to snag critical data on their way out the door?
Though it's probably our fault, since we're all so trusting of our mega corp employers, and/or so optimistic about our chances of surviving layoffs, that no one is stashing the incriminating data ahead of time.
Are you sure about that? Microsoft's 2014 layoffs, which were large enough to be reported in the tech press, let employees keep network and building access until the actual layoff date.
- If you're looking to do this 100% to the letter, then you'll need to enter some form of VL agreement with an authorized reseller. This will come with a minimum purchase of 5 licenses.
- If you're looking to do this with a "real" key, but not by the book, then one of the gray market sites.
- If you're looking to do this morally (by paying Microsoft), but don't care if the actual activation is completed with the license you purchase, then purchase a Windows 11 Pro license but use https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts/ to activate your Windows 11 LTSC. The ISO itself can still be sourced from Microsoft.
- If you don't care about any of this, then the same as the above except don't buy the Windows 11 Pro License
- If you absolutely want to buy a single license "by the book"... there is no official offering available.