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Activation/WGA is what drove me away from Windows (none / 0) (#11)
by Anonymous User on Sat Apr 19, 2008 at 11:42:18 AM PDT

I had been a longtime fan of Microsoft until they released Windows XP with activation. When activation made its way into the Windows version of Office, it was clear it was time to move elsewhere.

After checking out a few alternatives, I made my way to the Mac and OS X, dropping nearly every application I regularly used when my main system ran Windows (from 3DS Max to Visual Studio) in favor of activation free, OS X compatible equivalents. The only applications that made the switch with me were Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and Microsoft Office because the Mac versions did not use any sort of activation scheme.

Since then Adobe has added activation to its Mac offerings, and while I tried to put off upgrading for as long as I could, I broke down and upgraded to Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium because it added native support for OS X running on Intel CPUs. Big mistake.

After only a few months of use the licensing system "failed catastrophically" and all of my Adobe CS3 apps refused to run (if you want to read the story behind this and Adobe's frustrating, yet comical response, you can do so here).

I have since sworn to never again purchase any software that uses activation or anything like WGA/OGA. I've been burned several times by failures in such schemes for software that I legitimately purchased and had every right to use.

I dread the day Microsoft adds activation and OGA to the Mac version of Office. I've no doubt it is coming one day, but I hope not too soon. While I've replaced Excel and PowerPoint with Numbers and Keynote from the iWork suite (both of which blow away the offerings from Microsoft and the OpenOffice.org in terms of usability), I still haven't found anything that bests Word when it comes to word processing -- at least for my needs. Hopefully Pages or OpenOffice.org's Writer will get to that point before MS brings activation and OGA to Office for the Mac.

I still keep a Windows machine around for the times that I absolutely have to write software for Windows, but I'm actively working to make sure those occasions are fewer and further between. Activation, along with WGA, has left such a bad taste in my mouth that I don't even give software vendors a chance anymore if their products employ such junk.


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