Ah. The elephant in the room.
I said in an earlier post that I have gotten very good at installing
virtual WinXP's. That also means that I've gotten very good at
overriding the activation scheme.
And the 2 newest computers I've bought run Ubuntu. In my house I have 9
computers; only 2 primarily run WinXP. I have a mac for my younger son,
an old thinkpad that now runs Peppermint, a netbook that runs ubuntu
(after I removed WinXP basic), desktops that run ubuntu x3, Fedora, & Mint.
One of the new Ubuntu desktops have a Vista VM in which I overrode the
activation requirement. I even activated Office 2010 in that.
Rexx has rallied here about how old XP is. He is probably complaining
about the need to still support it. After all, in surveys I've seen
WinXP still has more market share than the later windows do. I have to
use an old vpn client that only runs on XP for my job. Hospitals here
in the NYC area are always short on cash, so I don't foresee any windows
upgrades in the near future.
Windows is also a good example for the indirect costs of activation.
The IT guys at work have to track activation keys for WinXP. And we
still use Office 2000 which is before activation. They decided that
tracking keys for thousands of PC exceeded their resources for Office.
There are a lot of reasons why WinXP market share still exceeds that of
later windows. I venture to say that for many business, the costs of
activation (direct and indirect) exceeded any benefits so it's a No-Go.
Only recently have I seen the market share of WinXP fall <50%, and
that's because Mac OS share is rising, not that Win7 is rising.
I think even microsoft shot themselves in the foot (or higher) when the
bean counters thought activation was a great idea. They run a 24/7
phone line for activation issues. That has to cost them. And WinXP
activation is very easy to override; Vista and Win7 also can be
overridden.
So those who want to steal Win can still fairly easily do so. But
activation has increased the costs so that legitimate customers have
decided to not upgrade. I believe even MS has found that activation
reduced net profit on windows but won't admit it. MS's own data show
that the rate of "illegal" windows copies in the wild is around 1/3.
Activation has not changed that, but merely made it much harder for
paying customers.
Microsoft has made stealing windows a challenge, and hence more fun.
I could go on about the psychology of this and why activation enrages so
many. But this post is already too long.
--rob
On 09/25/2011 12:49 AM, vefatica wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Sep 2011 23:20:37 -0400, drrob1<> wrote:
>
> |But my religion still does not allow me to buy anything that requires
> |activation. When a product turns user-hostile, I'm out.
>
> What about Microsoft Windows?
