This comes full circle with everyone’s grandma incessantly calling every piece of software on their computer “The Microsoft.”

If you think this is bad, then you haven’t tried navigating the MS academic offerings. Over the last 10 or so years, I think it’s been called “dreamspark”, “imagine”, “MSDN Academic Alliance” (I liked this one, it actually made sense), “MSDN AA”, and now “Azure Dev Tools for Teaching” or “adt4t” when talking with support.

rant mode ON

Everytime the name is changed, it seems something else changes (OK it’s a new product) and the way to access installers and activate it differs. I just want to teach, but every couple of years I have to spend days trying to figure out how to get my iso’s and how to renew the subscription. A couple of years ago, and mind you this was after I had had an active academic relationship with Microsoft for 8 years, and my predecessor even longer than that before me, we had to submit invoices proving that the school owned the domainname for our emails and website, as well as a letter from the ministry of education that we were licensed to teach this course.

The support staff is very professional and helpful, and we’ve always been able to resolve renewal issues. But each year we have to go through the process of getting through a maze of support pages linking to chatbots, to find the correct form to contact support. I think the link to support form had the text “Beware of the leopard”.