Clayton wrote:
MS wants and loves piracy. That way they make sure that Windows is on
all machines and there's a possibility that people will find out through
WGA that their copy is pirated and pay for a genuine one. What MS
doesn't want is the people who would buy a pirated copy to use something
like Linux. As Linux is free, MS cannot compete with that by lowering
their price.
They don't love piracy. True it had a side benefit years ago, with
Windows being easy to get and having no copy protection. Nobody seems
to realize that there were few desktop OS's at the time, and none had
copy protection. It wasn't "they didn't copy protect it cuz they
wanted people to warez it", it was "the didn't copy protect it, just
like nobody else copy protected theirs." Apps were the same way. If
MS had a brutal copy protection mechanism on Office years ago, they'd
be up against Lotus's Office suite, which had no such protection
either.
WGA is proof that MS is tired of people stealing their products. The
fact that they are willing to tarnish themselves with all these false
positives on WGA checks is proof that they don't care what people
think of them protecting their property. It's like chemotherapy, they
will hurt themselves to help themselves. A handful of whiny users with
false (or true) positives on WGA balance out against the vast majority
of legal users with no hassles. WGA is also not free to implement, it
costs MS alot of money to run the servers and support desks just to
handle that.
Windows has market saturation. They don't need to entice people
anymore. A drug dealer doesn't need to offer free samples when he
knows everyone is already hooked on his drug. He just sets his price
and waits for his clients.
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