Baby, Why You Makes Me Hate You?

Once again, Microsoft is looking to treat its customers like criminals.

Now, in theory, every copy of Windows is legit and no one will be influenced by this. I don't exactly agree with the idea of having to pay for a brand new OS for every computer you own, but that's not the point.

The point is that a person who buys a copy of Windows should be entitled to a little bit of respect. It's one thing for Microsoft to ask "I'm not sure if this copy of Windows is legit. Mind if I check?" It is another thing altogether to continually complicate the process for legitimate users trying to do their jobs. At first it was a product key like "234-OEM-0071248-2392". OK. It's a little clunky, but I accept that I'm going to have to punch this in every time I install a Microsoft product. Then it grew into a big bitch of a alphanumeric string like "VKKGJ-QX734-WBCBR-7T3TV-RKJGM". Ugh. That's more complicated than the numbers, but I suppose you could still commit it to memory through the use of a mnemonic. Victor Kan't Kill Gary Jones. Et cetera, et cetera.

Then Microsoft went completely overboard and starting requiring users to activate the product. And by activate, they mean "register", and by "require", I mean you had 30 days to comply or else the OS would stop working. And they aren't kidding about registration: Windows will perform a sophisticated hardware scan of its host and report that info back to the mothership. The idea is that if you activate your copy of Windows XP, and then that disk is stolen or handed off to a friend to use, anyone else trying to activate the same copy of Windows with the same key will have a very slim chance of having the exact same hardware configuration that you yourself had.

I suppose Microsoft might be able to do something with the failed registration information, but the reality is that product activation is little more than a minor, but constant, inconvenience. I've been in situations in the past where I've said "Gee, I can't remember if I've already registered this CD key or this other one." In practice, I've never had Windows yell at me for trying to register the same key twice. Either I am amazingly adept at differentiating long strings of random letters and numbers, or Windows Product Activation has no teeth.

Now this. No more Internet-based product activation. Dear Microsoft: thanks a fucking bunch. This isn't going to hurt the jillion or so home users who never run Windows Update, have never heard of a bootloader, and who will literally run only the factory-installed operating system for the entire six or seven year lifespan of their machine.

On the other hand, you have a large contingent of the so-called "power users", people like me who write software, or test software, or run a large batch of betas and who live and breath the cutting edge of software, all still dripping wet with CVS tags and everything. These are the people who will be hurt by this, and they are perhaps the least deserving of such an insult. These power users are the bread and butter of the Windows platform because they make the applications that run on it. If Steve Ballmer can jump around like a demented lab monkey shouting "developers developers developers", then he can surely understand that those developers who make his platform worthwhile also reinstall their OS far more than the average housewife or retiree. I consider myself lucky to have only had to reinstall Windows XP three times in the last seven months. (Windows XP may be "the most stable Windows ever", but I don't gain much comfort knowing that they would have tried the same thing with their piece of shit Windows 95 platform if they'd thought of it then.)

This new additional step, which is already an additional step of an additional step, is just one more attempt by Microsoft to piss me off and complicate my life. Dear Microsoft: Stop treating your users like criminals. 'k thanks bye.

Meanwhile, an OpenBSD 3.6 CD set costs $45.00 and you can install it on five or five hundred machines without any activation whatsoever. Another advantage of OpenBSD is that the money spent on a CD set goes directly back into improving the next release. By comparison, I hear that there's a 100% mark-up on each copy of Windows: half of what you pay for that XP CD is pure profit. It doesn't turn into a better version of Windows. It turns into somebody's bass boat, or a set of golf clubs, or a down payment on a foreign car.

I'll give a shiny new donkey to the man who keeps me in private developer previews of Windows that have the activation feature disabled. It's either that or I need to find a new operating system. So far, I'm pretty happy with Mac OS X, especially considering that Windows is the premier gaming platform, and I don't play games. (I've recently gotten started on a new game of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but that's hardly the same, now is it?)

Windows: dedicated to making you resent it more and more with each release.