Yes. In most cases Microsoft employees get to use Microsoft softwares for free. Thepany has certain policy around it but a simplified takeaway is as long as the Microsoft software is not used to make money and is used by the employee himself no matter at work or at home on work machines or on home machines for business propose or personal use the employee doesn't have to pay for the software. Examplesn Windows is free to employees. You can bring your personal laptops to office and install Windows from corpnet. You can get a key from an internal IT site and use that to activate the Windows. There is a cap on the max number of keys every employee can request though. I have never hit the cap btw. Same to Office. Just bring your machine to office and install from intranet. You can also VPN from home to corpnet and install it to home machine. Visual Studio is free. All SKUs including the Ultimate. SQL Server is free. Other server products like Sharepoint Exchange etc. If you were to build your own personal site using Sharepoint you don't have to pay for the software -- it's just that few people are hosting Sharepoint and Exchange outside of office for their personal use. Employee gets MSDN subscription for free. You can download Windows and other softwares from MSDN subscription along with the activation key. MSDN subscription also gives an Azure subscription for free (with some monetary cap) Employee can get internal consumption Azure subscription. All cost on the subscription goes to your cost center (meaning your department pays for it). There is no monetary cap on such subscriptions though the subscription itself is subject to amon quota such as no more than N cores for virtual machines. As far as I remember N is probably 35 (maybe less). Under the internal consumption Azure subscription employees get unlimited hours of build time in Visual Studio Online. nExceptionsn Games are not free. Including PC games (e.g. Flight Simulation) and XBox games. Some less widely used softwares such as Streets and Trips (discontinued). Office for Mac. People who write products for Mac get those for free. But not everybody. nBut some of the games made by Microsoft can be bought frompany store for a quite deep discount. But you can't resale it. There were people reselling Windows they bought frompany store and got into jail. horizontal-rule Disclosure and credibility I have worked in Microsoft for 13 years. italic