From a different point of view, I don't see using PR to have lower fees very ethical. It looks to me like "lower our fees, or we are gonna trash you in our PR, and you know we have a good reputation".
That seems something of a double standard, companies are encouraged to use any legal means possible to improve profits, but customers need to stay silent about poor terms?
I don't think that really holds water.
The ethical thing for the researchers is to drive down costs everywhere they can to get the most money spent on research.
M$oft wants to maximize it's profits and is negotiating from a position of strength knowing that big enterprise integrations can't just say "f-this, were off to use ubuntu".
Funny how advice on this site is always "Charge what it's worth!" or "Don't be afraid to charge for your product!", unless of course, it's someone who's already made it, like Microsoft, and then it's the tired 20 year old "M$" meme again.
As somebody who has worked at research institutes in the US, this comes up a lot. Some companies say that an academic user must have an e-mail address ending in ".edu" (which in the US means a school or university), but others define it more broadly to include non-profit research institutes as well. It gets murky because many research institutes actually have grad students doing their projects there (even if they are officially enrolled at a university elsewhere).
