In his article on itwire.com, Stan Beer lets all the pent up anger most of us feel out, as he charges forward in his assault on the Microsoft Genuine Advantage program.

He correctly states that the program has never had any advantage for anyone outside of Redmond, Washington. It is, as all know, market-speak for the not-so-thinly-veiled antipiracy campaign Microsoft is waging on its customers. I use customers, because those who pirate software expect to be inconvenienced. The problem after the outage of a few days ago is that is shows how essentially flawed the program is. It shows how many of the Genuine Buyers of Genuine Product are put in a position of great strain or difficulty because Microsoft wants to ‘get tough’ on pirates.

Surely those who deal with this, from Redmond, know that the real pirates have a fix for every iteration of the WGA Check that arrives. It is an inconvenience for them for a short while at most - and again, they are prepared for it.

The one thing that everyone in the world who keeps up on any level with the workings in Redmond learned is that it is a real blessing to not be running Vista.

from the article:

One cannot really talk about WGA without also talking about Vista. With Vista, you get an operating system that requires vastly more processing power and memory to achieve equivalent performance to XP, less availability of drivers for third party peripherals, and, for the extra money it costs, you hand your vendor the right to spy on you and disable your software. Now that’s value!

Seriously though, one would think that Microsoft already has enough troubles with irate customers in other areas for the company to continue with WGA.  Microsoft is already spending more than $1 billion and counting on shoring up its problems with faulty Xbox 360 consoles.

 

It continues to be interesting to see how many times MIcrosoft will have to be taught the lesson that should have been learned long ago. It was a lesson that Lotus learned, much too late, as it allowed Microsoft to field an inferior product, and excel with it.

again from Mr Beer:

As other commentators have pointed out, the name Windows Genuine Advantage is beyond laughable. It is of zero advantage for users to have Microsoft spying on them. Piracy is Microsoft’s problem; it is not supposed to be the problem of legitimate users.

In its own interests Microsoft would do well to consider how much WGA is actually costing the company in terms of good will and weigh that up against how much it is actually doing to reduce piracy. Microsoft may believe that with a massive user base locked into its software it is in an invincible position and can therefore do what it likes. However, the mighty have fallen before and will do so again.

One parting thought. If piracy was such a problem for Microsoft in the days before WGA, how was the company able to grow to the size and position of market dominance it holds today?

 

So - will Microsoft learn in time?

[tags] Microsoft, Genuine Advantage, antipiracy program, customer value, Lotus [/tags]