Cost of Visual Studio Pro + MSDN for my (small) business was £1100. This for 2 years of MSDN, and it was some deal (at the reseller's suggestion) that also came with various Windows licences too. (More Windows 7 than I imagined was likely for the price, and I think Windows XP and Windows Server 2008 R2 too.) Renewal cost is something like £900.
I wouldn't refuse something cheaper, but the price seemed fair enough as these things go. For a side project this is perhaps a little steep, and if you could realistically use something cheaper you would be silly not to, but for a business with an actual need for all this Microsoft junk this seems like reasonable value.
Stuff that costs me less than £~500/yr: printer paper.
Stuff that costs me more than £~500/yr: everything else.
Then again, just to back up your point - my last employer switched everybody from MS Office to OpenOffice to avoid the licensing fees, even though numerous internal tools (that then had to be rewritten, at a cost of several man-weeks, plus drag due to changes in workflow for the less technical staff that used them) relied on VBA, COM and OLE stuff that OpenOffice didn't support. And the place I'm currently working with doesn't install Visual Studio on the servers (each server = 6-core Core i7 with 32GB RAM, 2TB RAID1, 1TB SSD) because apparently it would be too costly to do that. So maybe once you become big enough for MS to care about things start to become rather more expensive.
I wouldn't refuse something cheaper, but the price seemed fair enough as these things go. For a side project this is perhaps a little steep, and if you could realistically use something cheaper you would be silly not to, but for a business with an actual need for all this Microsoft junk this seems like reasonable value.
Stuff that costs me less than £~500/yr: printer paper.
Stuff that costs me more than £~500/yr: everything else.
Then again, just to back up your point - my last employer switched everybody from MS Office to OpenOffice to avoid the licensing fees, even though numerous internal tools (that then had to be rewritten, at a cost of several man-weeks, plus drag due to changes in workflow for the less technical staff that used them) relied on VBA, COM and OLE stuff that OpenOffice didn't support. And the place I'm currently working with doesn't install Visual Studio on the servers (each server = 6-core Core i7 with 32GB RAM, 2TB RAID1, 1TB SSD) because apparently it would be too costly to do that. So maybe once you become big enough for MS to care about things start to become rather more expensive.