https://www.npifinancial.com/smartspend-bulletins/the-anatom...
And MS audit would check that what you reported was what you had. And could result in big increases in contract pricing.
Now that everything is cloud this and 365 that I don’t know how much it applies anymore - everything is dynamic and traceable.
Famously in the early 2000s it was a huge issue for “medium” businesses who had used enterprise-style licensing. Tiny and small businesses just bought normal computers and software and would often escape notice.
AFAIK it was mainly a scare tactic to pressure companies into compliance and mostly just involved scary looking letters from a Microsoft-hired law firm.
Microsoft was double-dipping for a long time, selling volume licensing deals to companies that were often buying preinstalled Windows anyhow, just out of fear of non-compliance. Then once you have the volume deal, Microsoft products become easier to use and dominate the company's tech and reaching new deals with Microsoft becomes a nice-business-you-got-there-shame-if-something-happened-to-it kind of conversation.
Microsoft hasn't changed a bit, just smarter about tactics.
Business would have an "IT guy" who "saved money" - and they'd get a letter saying "let us audit you or we're taking you to court for copyright violations" and they'd scramble and agree to the audit.
Of course, the proper response was the legal version of "bite me" but since many of them were in violation, they acquiesced.
I never had it happen to anyone I was involved with or knew, but the stories were certainly flying around Slashdot (it was going to be the proximate trigger of the Year of Linux on the Desktop, don't you know).
