Paul Mehner

The $11K is of course the MSRP and is not the price you will have to pay or should pay.

If you are already in bed with an MSDN Universal sub then the math only puts you another $1500 or so above your current annual cost in order to take the Suite home.

A while back, and confirmed again a few weeks ago by a MS guy, TS will be offered as a throttled down (read: user limit) version as part of the Team Edition packages. If that really happens I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me. TS targets the big shops. It wouldn't make sense to price out the small boys while you're at it. Who knows? Thanks for the thoughts and listening to mine.

Paul, I have not seen any indication that a scaled down version of TS is going to be released via MSDN - nor have I heard anything about the $11K version.

Current MSDN subscribers have access to all of the toys (Universal subscribers), and there has been no word about their changing this after November this year - when the tools actually release.

Eric's statement about the MSDN Universal being higher is correct. I would encourage local .Net groups to consider pooling in and buying this for the group. There are often discount offers out there for corporations that purchase the Universal for different development teams - and local .Net (and other) Groups can benefit in the same way.

I heard from a reliable source that there would be an upgrade path from MSDN Universal to the Team Foundation Suite with an upgrade price tag currently estimated at $11,000.
For nearly ten years now I have plunked down my ~ $2,500 to receive enterprise editions of every Microsoft server and office product known to humankind. Very expensive stuff like enterprise editions of Windows 2003, SQL, Office, and Visual Studio. Suddenly, I may be able to stay current as a network administrator with my universal subscription, but I won't be able to stay current as an architect/developer/tester. In the scrum and agile methodologies, developers play all of these roles.
My customers will also be using all of these products, and this pricing scheme (renewable annually) is simply out of the realm of affordability for the small and micro sized business such as my own. Only the fortune 500 consulting firms will be able to fully service customers like the ones that I currently service.
In the end, I can probably pull a favor or two and get one of my friends to score a free or inexpensive copy for me when it is finally released; however, I hate to see Microsoft do this to its development community, and to itself. This pricing scheme is silly and harmful to Microsoft. It is going to drive away and sour many of their advocates in the development community. If they need to throttle the TFS that they ship with Universal so that it only supports one or two developers to protect their pricing structure, that is fine and understandable... but they shouldn't lock the individual consultants and professionals who advocate their products out of the game.

Yeah, I wish I had proof on the throttled TS version. There was a press release on it early this year but it has since vanished. I had it confirmed at TechEd by members of the VSTS PM team but they stated it was not public knowledge. We can hope but obviously not count on it.