It would be strange if it was true. Unless things have changed in the past ~1 year, Microsoft does not encourage employees to get their non-employee friends to use the employee discount. There is some fairly specific stuff about being able to use your employee discount on gifts, but not in exchange for $s or products.

Weird. When I bought MS-Office at the Microsoft store on the Redmond campus, an employee gave the cashier his employee number while I waited. Lots of people were doing that, just as openly.