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An Enterprise customer of Microsoft agrees to be audited by MS. In exchange they pay a certain amount for effectively “unlimited use” of the appropriate software. In the past this meant volume license keys that would always activate; wouldn’t count how many devices, etc.

And MS audit would check that what you reported was what you had. And could result in big increases in contract pricing.

Now that everything is cloud this and 365 that I don’t know how much it applies anymore - everything is dynamic and traceable.

Famously in the early 2000s it was a huge issue for “medium” businesses who had used enterprise-style licensing. Tiny and small businesses just bought normal computers and software and would often escape notice.

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sgerenser 8 hours ago | parent [-]

That was one aspect of the auditing, but they also sent audit notices to random small and medium businesses who were not volume license customers. Basically fishing for license violations, which obviously were very common (and usually unintentional) back in the 90s and early 2000s. Things like installing windows XP or Office on multiple machines without buying extra licenses.

AFAIK it was mainly a scare tactic to pressure companies into compliance and mostly just involved scary looking letters from a Microsoft-hired law firm.

	▲	mrj 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This was what happened to us, we were a small company and were just buying Dells with Windows already installed. We had valid license keys from the factory on everything, so it didn't make sense to me that we needed some volume key for more Windows. So we didn't buy a volume license but still got the audit demand. Microsoft was double-dipping for a long time, selling volume licensing deals to companies that were often buying preinstalled Windows anyhow, just out of fear of non-compliance. Then once you have the volume deal, Microsoft products become easier to use and dominate the company's tech and reaching new deals with Microsoft becomes a nice-business-you-got-there-shame-if-something-happened-to-it kind of conversation. Microsoft hasn't changed a bit, just smarter about tactics.
	▲	bombcar 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It was a scare tactic, and it only really worked because there were a large percentage of illicit installs going around. Business would have an "IT guy" who "saved money" - and they'd get a letter saying "let us audit you or we're taking you to court for copyright violations" and they'd scramble and agree to the audit. Of course, the proper response was the legal version of "bite me" but since many of them were in violation, they acquiesced. I never had it happen to anyone I was involved with or knew, but the stories were certainly flying around Slashdot (it was going to be the proximate trigger of the Year of Linux on the Desktop, don't you know).
	▲	ohgr 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I was working for a law firm when they did that to us. The letter they got sent back was hilarious.