This touches on something that I think is very frustrating on Microsoft's part. What you are describing is actually a violation of the Microsoft MSDN licensing agreement; unless I am misreading their licensing document. Here is what is says about MSDN OS usage: Many MSDN subscribers use a computer for mixed use—both design, development, testing, and demonstration of your programs (the use allowed under the MSDN subscription license) and some other use. Using the software in any other way, such as for doing email, playing games, or editing a document is another use and is not covered by the MSDN subscription license. When this happens, the underlying operating system must also be licensed normally by purchasing a regular copy of Windows such as the one that came with a new OEM PC. That is just insane! We pay thousands of dollars a year for this stuff and yet still have to pay for our main OS!

It makes me nervous to read this line: "The second thing is giving our product management and usability teams the task of going out into the community to get suggestions on how we can make this amazing tool even better." If they didn't already have something in mind on how to improve the tool, or even know if there are improvements to be made, before buying the tool then why did they buy it? Just to be nice to Lutz who has helped millions of programmers do their jobs better? I don't think so. It could be just to redirect more people through their site and force them to register with them. Will the tool still update itself automatically? I hope so. I hope they don't force us to their site for each update. :^)