MSDN - What a waste
I've been an MVP for 7? years now, and in that time I've come to love having access to an MSDN Subscription, I'd never want to loose it, it's too useful.
Every year the MSDN program send me a completely new set of DVD's.
According to the UK MVP web site there are over 150 MVP's in the UK alone, each one of them having access to MSDN or TechNet, so let's take an educated guess and say that 50% of the MVP's in the UK subscribe to MSDN, that's 75 MSDN subscriptions.
Because the UK is grouped into the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) bucket, we only have one choice of MSDN which is "World Wide".
That results in us receiving all the DVDs for the English versions of software as well as every other language in the Western World.
You can now get an "online only" version of MSDN, but I really want the English DVD's they're very handy when you're offline. Granted, I could download an burn my own copy of each but hell, it's a subscription service, why should subscribers have to do the hard work.
Here is a count of a fresh MSDN subscription with the addition of the Visual Studio Team Suite discs which come seperatly. (Don't believe me? Check out the offical list here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/aa948871.aspx)
I want only 25 of those DVDs and the others will go into the bin. Now let's multiply that number by my estimated number of MVP's in the UK subscribing to MSDN (I'll assume no one has changed to Online only subscriptions).
85 Foreign Language DVDs * 75 UK MVP's = 6375 wasted DVDs being sent out for each MSDN renewal to UK MVP's
That number of course doesn't include the 10 or so discs a quarter MSDN send out to update the subscription of which most are Foreign language discs.
Now I've just talked about MVP's here, let's think about the number of UK based people subscribing to MSDN off their own back, obviously I don't have the numbers so let's take a guess at 10,000 UK MSDN subscriptions.
85 Foreign Language DVDs * 10,000 UK MSDN Subscribers = 850,000 wasted DVDs being sent out for each MSDN renewal in the UK.
Now, remember that each country in Europe suffers the same problem, France, Sweeden, Turkey, Greece, Israel, Portugal, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, UK and the Arabic countries.
So let's say 13 countries and say each one has 1000 MSDN Subscribers, that's 13,000 MSDN Subscriptions, that's a hell of a lot of wasted DVDs.
Why am I writing this post? Well I want Microsoft to take notice and change the way they ship MSDN subscriptions, I want you the community to tell Microsoft that they're wasting natural resources, money and our time in sorting out all these bloomin DVDs. I'd emplore you to contact Microsoft and make them aware of your concerns about their way of distributing MSDN.
UK MSDN Contact: 0800 123 536 or MSDNIC@eu.subservices.com
US MSDN: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=2028438
UPDATE: Response from MSDN (Next day)
"I have looked into your query for you. As you have the Visual Studio team Suite 2005 with MSDN Premium. we can only ship the media with all languages. there is no English only dvd pack for this level. The other option you have is to change to a online only subscription."
Sorry for the rant....
Phil.