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Who is the Biggest Turkey? | 24 comments (24 topical) | Post A Comment
Microsoft?[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#8)
by Anonymous User on Tue Dec 02, 2003 at 01:49:23 PM PDT

I'm not at all surprised to see Microsoft top the list. Microsoft was the first large company to plague the computing community with Product Activation. Though touted as an "anti-piracy" measure, this is really a sneak attack on legitimate, paying users of the company. In the near future, Microsoft will be able to force you to upgrade, at your cost, whether you want to or not, by simply refusing to "activate" your computer should you need to reinstall the operating system. Moreover, by making the software so buggy that you need to reinstall it frequently, they guarantee that this time will eventually come. The second runner-up also stumbled over the Product Activation greed pill. I suspect that if Product Activation was listed as a choice for a Turkey award, it would garner the highest majority of votes.

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"I told you so"[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#9)
by Reziac on Tue Dec 02, 2003 at 10:23:28 PM PDT

I've been saying something to that effect ever since Activation first reared its ugly head. To my firsthand knowledge, M$ has been talking about "software by subscription" since the Win2K preview seminars in 1999. Activation makes forcing upgrades simple -- just refuse to reactivate the old product, or require a fee that makes upgrading seem the less expensive option over the long run. Much as some companies used to refuse to replace dead install diskettes (requiring instead that you buy an upgrade, or do without. So far the biggest turkey I know of for such forced upgrades is Intuit's Quickbooks.)

BTW, go read all the posts on Slashdot by "Alsee" (http://slashdot.org/~alsee -- all those comments attached to the Phoenix BIOS article) re the Trusted Computing initiative being implemented in hardware, in a way that makes breaking it impossible (for all practical purposes). Very, very scary, and relevant to topics such as activation and forced upgrades.



~REZ~
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