No it's that for a very long time it was cheaper to become a Microsoft Partner than to pay for your own licenses. MPN allowed their partners to use licenses fo

No it's that for a very long time it was cheaper to become a Microsoft Partner than to pay for your own licenses. MPN allowed their partners to use licenses for free for any "internal" use, now they are restricting it to only business development use cases. This means that you can have an IT services company that barely sells any microsoft products, paying a small yearly fee to be a partner whilst getting considerably more than they pay out in return in the form of free licenses (for all internal business uses), technical support, training and other perks. What Microsoft has done now is basically restrict the uses of MPN licenses only for business development and any other in good faith activities that are actually designed to promote Microsoft products to your customers. Basically with this new change you can't have a 500+ employee company anymore that doesn't pay licenses for Windows, CAL licenses for domain, exchange, gets free sharepoint and more importantly free tech support which is often misused to solve customer problems rather than their own. This more or less brings the MPN licenses closer to what say MSDN licenses are; you can use them to learn how stuff works, you can use them to demo the tech to clients, and for internal POC's but you can't roll into production on their back.