At 11:09 AM 03/08/2005, Ben Ruset wrote:
First off, I NEVER insinuated that. I like Thane and respect him, and respect the fact that he is an OEM trying to survive in a highly competitive world. I used to work at a whitebox OEM, so I know the deal.
Actually, you did. You pretty much stated that I thought that people shouldn't be able to protect themselves from piracy. Then you went on an anti-Linux rant. It was pretty weird.
STOP THE PRESSES!!! Less than 1 minute of his time is spent in activating WGA. Add an extra $1 ($10 CDN, heh) to the price of the system to cover the effort it takes to do the extra mouse click. If things are that hard up that you're micromanaging your system builds down to the second, then there's something vastly wrong with the way you're doing business.
That's right. My honest customers should pay more so that MS can protect itself. That's fair.
People who are using pirated Windows are *not* legitimate users. Considering that MS is offering a nice discount on a genuine XP licence for those who willfully pirated XP, and a free licence for those users who were duped into buying a hot copy of XP from a black market retailer, I'd day that it's a pretty generous (and sane) deal.
I agree, they are being very reasonable about the upgrade deal. Kudos to them for that. But they should find out where the person got the pirated Windows and then shut that place down.
T
