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Microsoft project server 2010 end of life free. Project Server 2010 end of support roadmap

 

In addition, Microsoft customer service will no longer be available to provide Office technical support. Learn more. Office includes apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook but we have not introduced any features in almost 10 years. Microsoft includes premium versions of these apps plus other services that are enabled over the internet, including online storage with OneDrive, added security and coauthoring capabilities.

Microsoft is always up to date with the latest features and available as a monthly or annual subscription. Learn more about enterprise , education and consumer subscriptions. See system requirements for compatible versions of Windows and macOS, and for other feature requirements.

However, internet access is required to install and activate all the latest releases of Office suites and all Microsoft subscription plans. For Microsoft plans, internet access is also needed to manage your subscription account, for example to install Office on other PCs or to change billing options.

Internet access is also required to access documents stored on OneDrive, unless you install the OneDrive desktop app. You should also connect to the internet regularly to keep your version of Office up to date and benefit from automatic upgrades. To reactivate your Office applications, reconnect to the internet. Documents that you have created belong fully to you. If you cancel your subscription or it expires, you can still access and download all your files by signing into OneDrive directly using the Microsoft account you used to set up Microsoft You do lose the additional storage that comes with your subscription, so you must save your files elsewhere or buy more OneDrive storage if your OneDrive account exceeds the free storage quota.

No, while Microsoft offers the best collaboration experience, others can view and edit your files for free using Office for the web. If you purchase an auto-renew subscription, your subscription starts when you complete your purchase.

You can purchase auto-renew subscriptions from Microsoft If you purchase a pre-paid subscription, your subscription starts when you activate your subscription and land on your My Account page.

You can purchase pre-paid subscriptions from a retailer or reseller, or a Microsoft support agent. If you have an active Microsoft Family subscription, you can share it with up to five members of your household six total. To add someone to your subscription, visit www. Each person you add will receive an email with the steps they need to follow.

Once they have accepted and completed the steps, their information, including the installs they are using, will appear on your My Account page. You can stop sharing your subscription with someone or remove a device they are using at www. You can now update this to a different file name or location before saving the pipeline. Finally, we you will have more control when checking in the azure-pipelines. We've added a preview but don't run mode for YAML pipelines. Now, you can try out a YAML pipeline without committing it to a repo or running it.

In future updates, this API will be used in a new editor feature. For developers: POST to dev. With this release, you can schedule builds using cron syntax in your YAML file and take advantage of the following benefits:. We have also made it easy for you to diagnose problems with cron schedules. The Scheduled runs in the Run pipeline menu will give you a preview of the upcoming few scheduled runs for your pipeline to help you diagnose errors with your cron schedules.

We've been working on an updated user experience to manage your service connections. These updates make the service connection experience modern and consistent with the direction of Azure DevOps. We introduced the new UI for service connections as a preview feature earlier this year.

Thanks to everyone who tried the new experience and provided their valuable feedback to us. Along with the user experience refresh, we've also added two capabilities which are critical for consuming service connections in YAML pipelines: pipeline authorizations and approvals and checks. The new user experience will be turned on by default with this update.

You will still have the option to opt-out of the preview. We plan to introduce Cross-project Sharing of Service Connections as a new capability. You can find more details about the sharing experience and the security roles here. When you start a manual run, you may sometimes want to skip a few stages in your pipeline.

For instance, if you do not want to deploy to production, or if you want to skip deploying to a few environments in production.

You can now do this with your YAML pipelines. The updated run pipeline panel presents a list of stages from the YAML file, and you have the option to skip one or more of those stages. You must exercise caution when skipping stages. For instance, if your first stage produces certain artifacts that are needed for subsequent stages, then you should not skip the first stage.

The run panel presents a generic warning whenever you skip stages that have downstream dependencies. It is left to you as to whether those dependencies are true artifact dependencies or whether they are just present for sequencing of deployments. Skipping a stage is equivalent to rewiring the dependencies between stages.

Any immediate downstream dependencies of the skipped stage are made to depend on the upstream parent of the skipped stage. If the run fails and if you attempt to rerun a failed stage, that attempt will also have the same skipping behavior. To change which stages are skipped, you have to start a new run. There is a new service connections UI. This new UI is built on modern design standards and it comes with various critical features to support multi-stage YAML CD pipelines such as approvals, authorizations, and cross-project sharing.

Learn more about service connections here. We added the ability to manually pick up pipeline resource versions in the create run dialogue. If you consume a pipeline as a resource in another pipeline, you can now pick the version of that pipeline when creating a run. It can be challenging to port YAML based pipelines from one project to another as you need to manually set up the pipeline variables and variable groups.

However, with the pipeline variable group and variable management commands, you can now script the set up and management of pipeline variables and variable groups which can in turn be version controlled, allowing you to easily share the instructions to move and set up pipelines from one project to another. When creating a PR, it can be challenging to validate if the changes might break the pipeline run on the target branch.

However, with the capability to trigger a pipeline run or queue a build for a PR branch, you can now validate and visualize the changes going in by running it against the target pipeline. Refer az pipelines run and az pipelines build queue command documentation for more information.

With Azure DevOps CLI, you can now to skip the first automated pipeline run on creating a pipeline by including the --skip-first-run parameter. Refer az pipeline create command documentation for more information. Service endpoint CLI commands supported only azure rm and github service endpoint set up and management.

However, with this release, service endpoint commands allow you to create any service endpoint by providing the configuration via file and provides optimized commands - az devops service-endpoint github and az devops service-endpoint azurerm, which provide first class support to create service endpoints of these types.

Refer the command documentation for more information. A deployment job is a special type of job that is used to deploy your app to an environment. With this update, we have added support for step references in a deployment job. For example, you can define a set of steps in one file and refer to it in a deployment job. We have also added support for additional properties to the deployment job.

For example, here are few properties of a deployment job that you can now set,. For more details about deployment jobs and the full syntax to specify a deployment job, see Deployment job.

In your CI pipeline run view, you will now see a new 'Associated pipelines' tab where you can find all the pipeline runs that consume your pipeline and artifacts from it. We have recently introduced a new resource type called packages that adds support to consume NuGet and npm packages from GitHub as a resource in YAML pipelines. As part of this resource, you can now specify the package type NuGet or npm that you want to consume from GitHub. You can also enable automated pipeline triggers upon the release of a new package version.

Today the support is only available for consuming packages from GitHub, but moving forward, we plan to extend the support to consume packages from other package repositories such as NuGet , npm , AzureArtifacts and many more. Refer to the example below for details:. Once this limitation is lifted, we will provide support for other types of authentication. By default, packages are not automatically downloaded in your jobs, hence why we have introduced a getPackage macro that allows you consume the package that is defined in the resource.

We added a link to the resource view of Kubernetes environments so you can navigate to the Azure blade for the corresponding cluster. This applies to environments that are mapped to namespaces in Azure Kubernetes Service clusters. Folders allow organizing pipelines for easier discoverability and security control.

Often you may want to configure custom email notifications for all release pipelines, that are represented by all pipelines under a folder. Previously, you had to configure multiple subscriptions or have complex query in the subscriptions to get focused emails.

With this update, you can now add a release folder clause to the deployment completed and approval pending events and simplify the subscriptions. Currently, you can automatically link work items with classic builds. However, this was not possible with YAML pipelines.

With this update we have addressed this gap. When you run a pipeline successfully using code from a specified branch, Azure Pipelines will automatically associate the run with all the work items which are inferred through the commits in that code.

When you open the work item, you will be able to see the runs in which the code for that work item was built. To configure this, use the settings panel of a pipeline. When running a multi-stage YAML pipeline, you can now cancel the execution of a stage while it is in progress. This is helpful if you know that the stage is going to fail or if you have another run that you want to start. One of the most requested features in multi-stage pipelines is the ability to retry a failed stage without having to start from the beginning.

With this update, we are adding a big portion of this functionality. You can now retry a pipeline stage when the execution fails. Any jobs that failed in the first attempt and those that depend transitively on those failed jobs are all re-attempted.

This can help you save time in several ways. For instance, when you run multiple jobs in a stage, you might want each stage to run tests on a different platform.

If the tests on one platform fail while others pass, you can save time by not re-running the jobs that passed. As another example, a deployment stage may have failed due to flaky network connection. Retrying that stage will help you save time by not having to produce another build. There are a few known gaps in this feature. For example, you cannot retry a stage that you explicitly cancel.

We are working to close these gaps in future updates. Infrastructure owners can protect their environments and seek manual approvals before a stage in any pipeline deploys to them. With complete segregation of roles between infrastructure environment and application pipeline owners, you will ensure manual sign off for deployment in a particular pipeline and get central control in applying the same checks across all deployments to the environment.

Previously, the gate timeout limit in release pipelines was three days. With this update, the timeout limit has been increased to 15 days to allow gates with longer durations. We also increased the frequency of the gate to 30 minutes.

Previously, when creating a new pipeline for a Dockerfile in new pipeline creation, the template recommended pushing the image to an Azure Container Registry and deploying to an Azure Kubernetes Service. We added a new template to let you build an image using the agent without the need to push to a container registry.

Azure App Service allows configuration through various settings like app settings, connection strings and other general configuration settings.

This task can be used along with other App service tasks to deploy , manage and configure your Web apps, Function apps or any other containerized App Services. Azure App Service now supports Swap with preview on its deployment slots. This is a good way to validate the app with production configuration before the app is actually swapped from a staging slot into production slot.

Previously, regular expression filters for Azure Container Registry and Docker Hub artifacts were only available at the release pipeline level. They have now been added at the stage level as well. We have enabled configuring approvals on service connections and agent pools. For approvals we follow segregation of roles between infrastructure owners and developers. By configuring approvals on your resources such as environments, service connections and agent pools, you will be assured that all pipeline runs that use resources will require approval first.

The experience is similar to configuring approvals for environments. When an approval is pending on a resource referenced in a stage, the execution of the pipeline waits until the pipeline is manually approved. Azure Pipelines now brings supports for Container Structure Tests. This framework provides a convenient and powerful way to verify the contents and structure of your containers. You can validate the structure of an image based on four categories of tests which can be run together: command tests, file existence tests, file content tests and metadata tests.

Test data is available in the pipeline run with an error message to help you better troubleshoot failures. Pipeline decorators allow for adding steps to the beginning and end of every job.

This is different than adding steps to a single definition because it applies to all pipelines in an collection. We have been supporting decorators for builds and YAML pipelines, with customers using them to centrally control the steps in their jobs. We are now extending the support to release pipelines as well. You can create extensions to add steps targeting the new contribution point and they will be added to all agent jobs in release pipelines.

Previously, we supported deployments only to the Resource Group level. With this update we have added support to deploy ARM templates to both the subscription and management group levels. This will help you when deploying a set of resources together but place them in different resource groups or subscriptions.

For example, deploying the backup virtual machine for Azure Site Recovery to a separate resource group and location. You can now consume artifacts published by your CI pipeline and enable pipeline completion triggers. In multi-stage YAML pipelines, we are introducing pipelines as a resource.

In addition, you can download the artifacts published by your pipeline resource using the - download task. For more details, see the downloading artifacts documentation here.

One of the key advantages of continuous delivery of application updates is the ability to quickly push updates into production for specific microservices. This gives you the ability to quickly respond to changes in business requirements. Environment was introduced as a first-class concept enabling orchestration of deployment strategies and facilitating zero downtime releases. Previously, we supported the runOnce strategy which executed the steps once sequentially.

With support for canary strategy in multi-stage pipelines, you can now reduce the risk by slowly rolling out the change to a small subset. As you gain more confidence in the new version, you can start rolling it out to more servers in your infrastructure and route more users to it. We are looking for early feedback on support for VM resource in environments and performing rolling deployment strategy across multiple machines.

Contact us to enroll. In YAML pipelines, we follow a resource owner-controlled approval configuration. Resource owners configure approvals on the resource and all pipelines that use the resource pause for approvals before start of the stage consuming the resource. It is common for SOX based application owners to restrict the requester of the deployment from approving their own deployments.

You can now use advanced approval options to configure approval policies like requester should not approve, require approval from a subset of users and approval timeout.

If you need to consume a container image published to ACR Azure Container Registry as part of your pipeline and trigger your pipeline whenever a new image got published, you can use ACR container resource. Moreover, ACR image meta-data can be accessed using predefined variables. We've enhanced the evaluate artifact check to make it easier to add policies from a list of out of the box policy definitions. The policy definition will be generated automatically and added to the check configuration which can be updated if needed.

You can now define output variables in a deployment job's lifecycle hooks and consume them in other downstream steps and jobs within the same stage. While executing deployment strategies, you can access output variables across jobs using the following syntax. Learn more on how to set a multi-job output variable.

In classic release pipelines, it is common to rely on scheduled deployments for regular updates. But, when you have a critical fix, you may choose to start a manual deployment out-of-band. When doing so, older releases continue to stay scheduled. This posed a challenge since the manual deployment would be rolled back when the deployments resumed as per schedule.

Many of you reported this issue and we have now fixed it. With the fix, all older scheduled deployments to the environment would be cancelled when you manually start a deployment. This is only applicable when the queueing option is selected as "Deploy latest and cancel others".

A resource is anything used by a pipeline that is outside the pipeline. Resources must be authorized before they can be used. Previously, when using unauthorized resources in a YAML pipeline, it failed with a resource authorization error. You had to authorize the resources from the summary page of the failed run. In addition, the pipeline failed if it was using a variable that referenced an unauthorized resource.

We are now making it easier to manage resource authorizations. Instead of failing the run, the run will wait for permissions on the resources at the start of the stage consuming the resource. A resource owner can view the pipeline and authorize the resource from the Security page. You can now define a set of policies and add the policy evaluation as a check on an environment for container image artifacts.

When a pipeline runs, the execution pauses before starting a stage that uses the environment. The specified policy is evaluated against the available metadata for the image being deployed. The check passes when the policy is successful and marks the stage as failed if the check fails. Previously, we didn't filter the service connections in the ARM template deployment task. This may result in the deployment to fail if you are selecting a lower scope service connection to perform ARM template deployments to a broader scope.

Now, we added filtering of service connections to filter out lower scoped service connections based on the deployment scope you choose. ReviewApp deploys every pull request from your Git repository to a dynamic environment resource.

This will make it easy for you to create and manage reviewApp resources and benefit from all the traceability and diagnosis capability of the environment features. By using the reviewApp keyword, you can create a clone of a resource dynamically create a new resource based on an existing resource in an environment and add the new resource to the environment.

Now you can enable automatic and user-specified metadata collection from pipeline tasks. You can use metadata to enforce artifact policy on an environment using the evaluate artifact check. One of the most requested features in Environments was VM deployments. With this update, we are enabling Virtual Machine resource in Environments. You can now orchestrate deployments across multiple machines and perform rolling updates using YAML pipelines. You can also install the agent on each of your target servers directly and drive rolling deployment to those servers.

In addition, you can use the full task catalog on your target machines. A rolling deployment replaces instances of the previous version of an application with instances of the new version of the application on a set of machines rolling set in each iteration. For example, below rolling deployment updates up to five targets in each iteration. The selection accounts for the number of targets that must remain available at any time, excluding the targets that are being deployed to.

It is also used to determine the success and failure conditions during deployment. With this update, all available artifacts from the current pipeline and from the associated pipeline resources are downloaded only in deploy lifecycle-hook. However, you can choose to download by specifying Download Pipeline Artifact task. For example, when you retry a stage, it will re-run the deployment on all VMs not just failed targets.

Azure Pipelines has supported deployments controlled with manual approvals for some time now. With the latest enhancements, you now have additional control over your deployments. In addition to approvals, resource owners can now add automated checks to verify security and quality policies.

These checks can be used to trigger operations and then wait for them to complete. Using the additional checks, you can now define health criteria based on multiple sources and be assured that all deployments targeting your resources are safe, regardless of the YAML pipeline performing the deployment. Evaluation of each check can be repeated periodically based on the specified Retry Interval for the check.

The following additional checks are now available:. When you add an approval to an environment or a service connection, all multi-stage pipelines that use the resource automatically wait for the approval at the start of the stage.

The designated approvers need to complete the approval before the pipeline can continue. With this update, the approvers are sent an email notification for the pending approval. Users and team owners can opt-out of or configure custom subscriptions using notification settings.

With this capability, we have made it easier for you to configure pipelines that use the deployment strategy of your choice, for example, Rolling , Canary , or Blue-Green. Using these out-of-box strategies, you can roll out updates in a safe manner and mitigate associated deployment risks. In the configuration pane, you will be prompted to select details about the Azure DevOps project where the pipeline will be created, the deployment group, build pipeline that publishes the package to be deployed and the deployment strategy of your choice.

Going ahead will configure a fully functional pipeline that deploys the selected package to this Virtual Machine. For more details, check out our documentation on configuring Deployment Strategies. Runtime parameters let you have more control over what values can be passed to a pipeline. Unlike variables, runtime parameters have data types and don't automatically become environment variables. With runtime parameters you can:. To learn more about runtime parameters, see the documentation here.

Currently, pipelines can be factored out into templates, promoting reuse and reducing boilerplate. The overall structure of the pipeline was still defined by the root YAML file. With this update, we added a more structured way to use pipeline templates. A root YAML file can now use the keyword extends to indicate that the main pipeline structure can be found in another file.

This puts you in control of what segments can be extended or altered and what segments are fixed. We've also enhanced pipeline parameters with data types to make clear the hooks that you can provide.

This example illustrates how you can provide simple hooks for the pipeline author to use. The template will always run a build, will optionally run additional steps provided by the pipeline, and then run an optional testing step.

In other words, the setting was only used to prompt for additional inputs when starting a new run. This will give you control over which variables can be changed when starting a new run. This setting is off by default in existing collections, but it will be on by default when you create a new Azure DevOps collection. Variables give you a convenient way to get key bits of data into various parts of your pipeline.

With this update we've added a few predefined variables to a deployment job. These variables are automatically set by the system, scoped to the specific deployment job and are read-only.

Pipelines often rely on multiple repositories. You can have different repositories with source, tools, scripts, or other items that you need to build your code. Previously, you had to add these repositories as submodules or as manual scripts to run git checkout. Now you can fetch and check out other repositories, in addition to the one you use to store your YAML pipeline. The third step will show two directories, MyCode and Tools in the sources directory. For more information, see Multi-repo checkout.

When a pipeline is running, Azure Pipelines adds information about the repo, branch, and commit that triggered the run. Now that YAML pipelines support checking out multiple repositories, you may also want to know the repo, branch, and commit that were checked out for other repositories. This data is available via a runtime expression, which now you can map into a variable.

For example:. Previously, when you referenced repositories in a YAML pipeline, all Azure Repos repositories had to be in the same collection as the pipeline. Now, you can point to repositories in other collections using a service connection. MyServiceConnection points to another Azure DevOps collection and has credentials which can access the repository in another project.

Both repos, self and otherrepo , will end up checked out. We've added predefined variables for YAML pipelines resources in the pipeline. Here is the list of the pipeline resource variables available. An option for kustomize has been added under bake action of KubernetesManifest task so that any folder containing kustomization.

Previously, the HelmDeploy task used the cluster user credentials for deployments. To address this issue, we added a checkbox that lets you use cluster admin credentials instead of a cluster user credentials. A new field has been introduced in the Docker Compose task to let you add arguments such as --no-cache.

The argument will be passed down by the task when running commands such as build. We've made several enhancements to the GitHub Release task. You can now have better control over release creation using the tag pattern field by specifying a tag regular expression and the release will be created only when the triggering commit is tagged with a matching string. We've also added capabilities to customize creation and formatting of changelog.

In the new section for changelog configuration, you can now specify the release against which the current release should be compared. The Compare to release can be the last full release excludes pre-releases , last non-draft release or any previous release matching your provided release tag. Additionally, the task provides changelog type field to format the changelog. Open Policy Agent is an open source, general-purpose policy engine that enables unified, context-aware policy enforcement.

We've added the Open Policy Agent installer task. September 22, Archived from the original on April 6, Archived from the original on July 20, Archived from the original on October 16, Archived PDF from the original on February 15, November 15, Archived from the original on October 4, May 11, Archived from the original on December 24, September 24, Archived from the original PDF on March 25, Archived from the original on May 2, The Seattle Times.

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January 22, August 30, Microsoft tries to get twice-rejected compression patent past skeptical examiners". United States Patent and Trademark Office. Australian Strategic Policy Institute. History Outline. Bill Gates Paul Allen. John W. Where do you want to go today? Alcatel-Lucent v. Microsoft Apple v. Microsoft European Union Microsoft competition case Microsoft v. Lindows Microsoft v. MikeRoweSoft Microsoft v. Shah United States v.

Microsoft antitrust case Microsoft Ireland case. Categories : Microsoft criticisms and controversies.

 

Microsoft project server 2010 end of life free -

 

Criticism of Microsoft has followed various aspects of its products and business practices. Issues with ease of use , robustness , and security of the company's software are common targets for critics.

In the s, a number of malware mishaps targeted security flaws in Windows and other products. Microsoft was also accused of locking vendors and consumers in to their products, and of not following or complying with existing standards in its software. The company has been the subject of numerous lawsuits , brought by several governments and by other companies, for unlawful monopolistic practices.

Commission case, and it received an million euro fine. On September 14, , Microsoft's flagship store was shut down by protestors as part of a direct action organized by Close the Camps NYC. From its inception, Microsoft defined itself as a platform company and understood the importance of attracting third-party programmers.

It did so by providing development tools, training, access to proprietary APIs in early versions, and partner programs. Although the resulting ubiquity of Microsoft software allows a user to benefit from network effects , critics and even Microsoft itself decry what they consider to be an " embrace, extend and extinguish " strategy of adding proprietary features to open standards or their software implementations, thereby using its market dominance to gain unofficial ownership of standards "extended" in this way.

Microsoft software is also presented as a "safe" choice for IT managers purchasing software systems. The Windows API is so broad, so deep, and so functional that most independent software vendors would be crazy not to use it. And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead It is this switching cost that has given the customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO total cost of ownership , our lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties [ In short, without this exclusive franchise called the Windows API, we would have been dead a long time ago.

Concerns were raised that this requirement would hinder the use of alternate operating systems such as Linux. In a post discussing secure boot on the Building Windows 8 blog, Microsoft developer Tony Mangefeste indicated that vendors would provide means to customize secure boot, stating that "At the end of the day, the customer is in control of their PC.

Microsoft's philosophy is to provide customers with the best experience first, and allow them to make decisions themselves. Gates' letter provoked many responses, with some hobbyists objecting to the broad accusation, and others supporting the principle of compensation.

The Halloween documents , internal Microsoft memos which were leaked to the open source community beginning in , indicate that some Microsoft employees perceive "open source" software — in particular, Linux — as a growing long-term threat to Microsoft's position in the software industry. Another concern of critics is that Microsoft may be using the distribution of shared source software to harvest names of developers who have been exposed to Microsoft code, as some believe that these developers could someday be the target of lawsuits if they were ever to participate in the development of competing products.

This issue is addressed in published papers from several organizations including the American Bar Association and the Open Source Initiative. Starting in the s, Microsoft was accused of maintaining "hidden" or "secret" APIs: interfaces to its operating system software that it deliberately keeps undocumented to gain a competitive advantage in its application software products. On October 10, , Microsoft joined the Open Invention Network community despite holding more than 60, patents.

On July 6, , Microsoft announced that it was placing their ECMA and ECMA specifications under their Community Promise pledging that they would not assert their patents against anyone implementing, distributing, or using alternative implementations of.

NET stack not submitted to the ECMA for standardization has been the source of patent violation concerns for much of the life of the project.

The concerns primarily relate to technologies developed by Microsoft on top of the. NET and Windows Forms see non-standardized namespaces , i. These technologies are today [ when? In June the Ubuntu Technical Board stated that it saw "no reason to exclude Mono or applications based upon it from the archive, or from the default installation set. Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields has stated, "We do have some serious concerns about Mono and we'll continue to look at it with our legal counsel to see what if any steps are needed on our part", yet "We haven't come to a legal conclusion that is pat enough for us to make the decision to take mono out".

In November at an Ubuntu Developer Summit , developers voted to have the Mono-based Banshee media player removed from Ubuntu's default installation beginning on Ubuntu Mono developer Joseph Michael Shields defended the performance of Banshee on ARM, and also the claims that Banshee was not well-maintained as being a "directed personal insult" to one of its major contributors. Microsoft ignored unauthorized copying of its own software for their benefit on the long term. While talking about users in China who don't pay for the software they use in , to an audience at the University of Washington, Bill Gates said "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours.

They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. The practice allowed Microsoft to gain some dominance over the Chinese market and only then taking measures against unauthorized copies.

In , by means of the Windows update mechanism, a verification program called " Windows Genuine Advantage " WGA was downloaded and installed. This behavior angered users and generated complaints in China with a lawyer stating that "Microsoft uses its monopoly to bundle its updates with the validation programs and forces its users to verify the genuineness of their software".

A common complaint [50] comes from those who want to purchase a computer that usually comes preinstalled with Windows without a copy of Windows pre-installed and without paying extra for the license either so that another operating system can be used or because a license was already acquired elsewhere, such as through the MSDN Academic Alliance program.

While it is possible to obtain a computer with no or free operating systems, [56] virtually all large computer vendors continue to bundle Microsoft Windows with the majority of the personal computers in their ranges.

The claimed increase in the price of a computer resulting from the inclusion of a Windows license has been called the "Windows tax" or "Microsoft tax" by opposing computer users. In , all major OEMs agreed to this restriction. Microsoft does not provide refunds for Windows licenses sold through an OEM, including licenses that come with the purchase of a computer or are pre-installed on a computer.

According to Microsoft's End User License Agreement for Windows 7 the ability to receive a refund for the operating system is determined by the hardware manufacturer: [61]. By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the software. Instead, contact the manufacturer or installer to determine its return policy. You must comply with that policy, which might limit your rights or require you to return the entire system on which the software is installed.

Acer Inc. Instead, contact the manufacturer or installer to determine their return policy for a refund or credit. Based on the updated language, vendors refused to issue partial refunds for Windows licenses, requiring that the computer be returned altogether. In some countries, this practice has been ruled a violation of consumer protection law. Microsoft's market dominance and business practices have attracted widespread resentment, which is not necessarily restricted to the company's competitors.

In a publication, Dan Geer argued the prevalence of Microsoft products has resulted in a monoculture which is dangerously easy for viruses to exploit. Microsoft has been criticized for the use of permatemp employees employees employed for years as "temporary," and therefore without medical benefits , use of forced retention tactics, where departing employees would be sued to prevent departure, as well as more traditional cost-saving measures, ranging from cutting medical benefits to not providing towels in company locker rooms.

Historically, Microsoft has also been accused of overworking employees, in many cases, leading to burnout within just a few years of joining the company.

The company is often referred to as a "Velvet Sweatshop", a term which originated in a Seattle Times article, [71] and later became used to describe the company by some of Microsoft's own employees. For example, the kitchenettes have free beverages and many buildings include exercise rooms and showers.

However, the company has been accused of attempting to keep employees at the company for unreasonably long hours and working them too much. A US state lawsuit was brought against Microsoft in representing 8, current and former employees that had been classified as "temporary" and "freelance", and became known as Vizcaino v.

The Final Settlement [73] came in The case was decided on the IRS-defined basis that such "permatemps" had their jobs defined by Microsoft, worked alongside regular employees doing the same work, and worked for long terms. A side effect of the "permatemp" lawsuit is that now contract employees are prevented from participating in team morale events and other activities that could be construed as making them "employees".

They are also limited to month contracts and must leave after that time for 6 months before returning under contract. Microsoft is the largest American corporate user of H-1B guest worker visas and has joined other large technology companies like Google in recently lobbying for looser H-1B visa restrictions. Jesse Jackson believes Microsoft should hire more minorities and women. Jackson has urged other companies to diversify their workforce. He believes that Microsoft made some progress when it appointed two women to its board of directors in During the antitrust case United States v.

Microsoft , ATL sent a poll to 19 state attorneys general purporting to show that "the public believes state AGs should devote their energy to causes other than Microsoft". In June , the AdTI published a report, quickly pulled under the argument that it was a draft version, which contained criticism of the copyleft model and the GNU General Public License. A May press release for the report stated that it would contain arguments suggesting that governments could be threatened by hackers and terrorists who could study potential vulnerabilities due to source availability if it used open source software.

However, the draft contained no references to these topics. The advert featured a newborn baby being launched out of its mother—aging as it flies through the air, and crashing into a gravestone. It contained the tagline "Life is short, play more. The comparison included the cost of hardware, and put Linux at a disadvantage by installing it on more expensive but poorer-performing hardware compared to that used for Windows. Microsoft spokesperson Catherine Brooker expressed the belief that the article had been "heavily written" by IBM employees who supported the rival OpenDocument format, though she provided no specific evidence.

Internet entrepreneur and Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales described Microsoft's offer as unethical. In , it was found that a photo on the Polish version of Microsoft's business productivity website—which depicted three people of various races during an office meeting—had been edited to replace the head of an African-American man with that of a Caucasian , whilst also failing to edit the person's hand to match the different skin color.

Microsoft apologized and quickly removed the image. In , Moneylife. Sapkale was accused of breaking his own site's privacy policy by posting the IP and email addresses of the commenters, while the commenting duo's failure to declare any interest looked, at best, like astroturfing.

In details on a partnership between Machinima. This is due to the company being tax resident in Bermuda as mentioned in the accounts for 'Microsoft Round Island One', a subsidiary that collects licence fees from the use of Microsoft software worldwide. Dame Margaret Hodge , a Labour MP in the UK said, "It is unsurprising — yet still shocking — that massively wealthy global corporations openly, unashamedly and blatantly refuse to pay tax on the profits they make in the countries where they undertake business".

John C. Dvorak said that in the s, Microsoft classified journalists as "Okay", "Sketchy", or "Needs work" and targeted "Needs work" journalists in an attempt to have them terminated. Dvorak said that he was denied information about Windows because he was on a blacklist. Microsoft along with Google, Yahoo , Cisco , AOL , Skype , and other companies has cooperated with the Chinese government in implementing a system of Internet censorship.

On June 4, , the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre , searches for the Tank Man image and videos were censored by Microsoft Bing search engine worldwide. Hours after Microsoft acknowledged the issue, the search returned only pictures of tanks elsewhere in the world. Search engines that license results from Microsoft such as DuckDuckGo and Yahoo faced similar issues.

Microsoft said the issue was "due to an accidental human error. The director of Human Rights Watch , Kenneth Roth , said he found the idea it was an inadvertent error "hard to believe". David Greene, Civil Liberties Director at Electronic Frontier Foundation , said that content moderation was impossible to do perfectly and "egregious mistakes are made all the time", but he further elaborated that "At worst, this was purposeful suppression at the request of a powerful state.

Microsoft was the first company to participate in the PRISM surveillance program , according to leaked NSA documents obtained by The Guardian [] and The Washington Post [] in June , and acknowledged by government officials following the leak. Microsoft has denied [] participation in such a program.

In a statement, Microsoft said that they "provide customer data only in response to legal processes.