From: "Robert G Lewis" 


"Geo"  wrote in message
news:44a328d2$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> "Robert G Lewis"  wrote in message
> news:44a320bc$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>
>> Good point, but I don't think MS is that crazy yet.  If you are going to
>> deactivate someone's XP then you had better be damned sure it's an
>> illegal
>> copy. Deactivate a legal copy and to me its worse than a hacker doing it.
>>
>> Based on what I've read on the WGA talkback I'm surprised no one has sued
> MS
>> yet.
>
> MS has already deactivated keys prior to WGA, security patches were used
> at
> one point to disable networking or something if the key was on the
> blacklist.
>
> I'm sure however they do it with WGA it will be slow and painful.
>
> Let me explain their POV. Everyone on the planet already owns a copy of
> Windows (they have sold that many) so the only way to keep the money pump
> going is to either get you to buy new with a new machine by tying it to
> the
> hardware or force deactivate and make you purchase new. If they let you
> take
> your legal copy from old machine to new machine, nobody is going to make
> any
> money. So if it appears they don't care about customers, they don't, they
> have to not care if they intend to keep raking in the billions.
>
> Of course they don't know the only way to get my money is to create a
> version of windows that's worth the costs to me. That means it has to
> empower me to do the things I want to do, even if those things are file
> sharing, recording and trading TV shows with family and friends over the
> internet, networking with linux devices, and editing copy protected DVD's.
> They don't know this because they stopped talking to actual users about 7
> years ago.
>
> Geo.
>
>

Oh I agree with your viewpoint for the most part. I personally think MS has
some very overly optimistic bean counters. I think it would amusing to
actually see their cost/benefit analysis on all this. Not to mention the
effect on TCO for the people that purchase the software. Should some of the
things that have happened to others happen to me XP ( and MS) will be
toast. Linux does most of what I want, Open Office 2 is more or less good
enough ( I've only found 1 word document that it renders incorrectly, VERY
incorrectly,) so I can live without MS.

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