Re: WGA Hacked?! Get a Fair and Balance Perspective!

David Candy wrote:

They don't care about piracy. It is not about valid licensing. It is about
blurring the line between MS and you so you need to pay MS regular money
(which is what they care about - the regular part). This is a long term goal
of MS (well over 10 years) and most of their efforts have failed. Some are
Application servers (they still perserve I saw a trial program using this
technology), MSN (was not the internet at first), yearly rental of Office in
Australia (cancelled last year), Windows update, PA, and WPA. They seem to
have taken a long term approach of training consumers (Symantec watched MS
and did do it - one has to pay symantec regular sums of money to use their
product, but the products are different and MS don't naturally lead to
regular payments).

Think of the phone system. If you buy a phone it's absolutely useless
without wires and exchanges. MS wants your computer to be useless without
MSNs or whatever ends up working.

MS regards OEM software as leased software (last time I saw figures OEM
sales were over 90% of of total sales). They can't get consumers to
regularly pay them so they tie it to the life of the hardware (Source MS OEM
Product Manager for OSs in Australia at the Christmas do in 2003 - they
bribed people to come with free Office XP Professional, I took me mum so she
could get a $1200 product for free as well - she found OEM ranting boring).

MS intends to own you. Mike Brannigan is actually misleading people here,
maybe inadvertantly as he is probably quite junior (I doubt he is a
strategic executive).

LOL! The first time I read that last line I thought it said he was "probably a quiet janitor"! :)

Good points and you may well be right, after all MS is in business to make money and make it quickly. Making a product that doesn't require support and establishing harmoniuos relationsdhip with customers is counter-productive to that end in the short term.

I await Mike's repsonse to my specific question and suggestions.

Steve


"Steve N." <me@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Mike Brannigan [MSFT] wrote:


"kurttrail" <dontemailme@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Winux P wrote:


Compulsory WGA??? What! Who are these people? For what purpose would
this be for? Speed up downloads? Wouldn't it take download time + get
an authenicated check? Rather than just download time?

Who and what would WGA stop from downloading\updating anyway? My
windows is already WGA'd, I thought this happened when MS activated
it.


It is for nothing but MS flexing its muscles over its paying customers.
WGA is separate from WPA.  The former know as Validation, and the latter
as Activation.  And they ar both separate and distinct from


Registration.

And MS expects all its paying customers to learn the difference, learn 

the

differing rules of each, and to fetch when MS tell them to. It's 

getting

to the point where the OS is technically easier to use, than knowing and
complying with all of MS rules & policies surrounding its


copy-protection

schemes!

--


Kurt the customers don't need to know or understand anything in 

particular,

activation can be one click and once they have the control installed 

then

WGA will be invisible to them too.
Only those not using genuine licensed product will have an issue.


Mike, of course MS has the right to ensure that installations of their
software are legitimate before providing support (product updates are
support), and that justifies the use of PA and WGA, however there are
many documented cases where these mechanisms have failed to identify
legitimately licensed installations, leaving legitimately licensed users
in a lurch.

What, if anything, is MS doing to correct these flaws? So far all I've
seen MS do is make it more difficult, particularly with regard to OEM
installations and "unauthorized" product keys. It no longer only applies
to major OEMs, either. Every OEM pre-install I have seen lately that is
not pre-activated encounters this.

And while we're at it, please print the keys on the COA in a font large
enough to read without a magnifying glass and quit using character
strings like "8B3B8".

Steve





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