On the other hand sometimes it means you MUST use the company products.

Consulted for a sub-sub-sub-subsidiary of Toshiba. All computer equipment had to be from Toshiba - the closest place to get Toshiba laptops was two COUNTRIES over.

They even had to tape over non-Toshiba branding from external displays that would be visible.

In fact, from what I've heard, Microsoft generally charges internally for usage of products across orgs.

Services, yes. Code is shared across the board at no cost.

I'd love to hear this story! Seems crazy ... but we live in a crazy world.

My uncle used to work at Compaq (back before they got bought by HP). When their computers broke, his team had to pay their support staff to get them fixed. (Via internal budgeting). But the support team knew internal customers would call them anyway and it was still compaq’s money, so they charged several times more for internal support calls than normal support calls.

My uncle’s team was having none of that, so they paid an external computer repair service to fix their computers. The external repair service subcontracted to compaq’s internal people anyway, so when their computers broke they called up (and paid) external consultants. Who in turn called compaq’s internal support team, who came downstairs and fixed their computers at a competitive price.

At Microsoft if you build a product using Azure (and if you want to use the cloud you MUST use Azure, you're not going to get approval to write a check to AWS) the costs come out of your budget. And it's taken seriously, to the point where teams will very much emphasize managing costs (what will this new feature cost on our Azure bill? Can we build it more efficiently? Oh wow, that refactor saved us 100k/month in cloud costs, don't forget that when we start talking about promotions...)

That makes sense since the amount you could use is variable. I was thinking more like somebody couldn't get a free word license at a MS subsidiary or something.

When I worked at MS Azure, we had to pay for Azure servers! (I believe our team had a $5k/month Azure bill.) It's part of internal budgeting, so that people within MS don't splurge on expensive things (because it does cost MS money for each person on Teams).

Did you drop a k? What can you do with 50 dollars?

Yes, thank you, it should be $5k. Edited.

Very mundane I'm afraid. Worked for a MS subsidiary, on an online game for xbox and PC. Developed on windows, using visual studio and deployed on azure, used TFS for bug tracking. All of the above costs were tracked rigorously, and charged to the project. Most frustrating was complying with the visual studio licenses across the board, with no assistance from the licensing team. We had an account manager for all of the above but my understanding is that he was more of an auditor than anything else.

Unrelated to software but the company my dad works for (motor repair) has to buy all its parts from its own distribution arm, at the marked up price. He then has to turn a profit on those parts as well as pricing the labour.

If cost price is £5 and the markup is 20%, he has to pay £6 to get the part, then charge £7.20 on the invoice to the customer. I’ll let you guess what that does to tender bids ;-)