I think it would be a good business decision for Microsoft to stop spending billions on new IP protection measures.

Here's my reasoning (I'm just making these numbers up, but bear with me). Suppose:
- that 300 million copies of the current OS (say, Windows 7) are in circulation
- that 250 million are legit copies at an average revenue for MS of $150 each. ($37.5B in revenue)
- that the remaining ~$20-25 B in revenue is from hardware, support, and other software sales.

That would leave 50 million pirated copies, and therefore "potential" sales. The problem is, for every $1B spent on piracy prevention, they would have to convert 6.7M pirated copies to legit copy sales at $150.

Now consider that likely 95% or more pirates will pirate the software regardless of price, or difficulty pirating. That's only 2.5 million copies (assuming a highly unlikely average of 1 copy per pirate), at a measly $375M in additional revenue.

With those kinds of numbers, even the spill-off effect (people who feel gypped because pirates don't pay, and therefore convert to piracy) would be insignificant to the $2-4B (guess) spent on IP protection. At $4B, they'd need to prevent a total of rougly 25M pirated copies from being circulated.

Since they're never going to perfect the anti-piracy measures, they should just spend a few hundred million on implementing standard IP protection measures to make piracy inconvenient, to prevent the few million people who only pirate because it's convenient from doing so.

Much more economical. Much less time consuming. Much better investment. Overall, a much better choice, IMO.

But then again, who am I to talk? I don't make $4M a year to be able to dictate these kinds of suggestions to the wh*** of the Business world. And by the way, don't mind me, I'm just a fan of the Linux business model :D

Made up numbers followed by "wh*** of the Business world"...?

Now that's what I call a credible post!

Who was asking for credibility? I was only asking to entertain the thought! Afterall, who besides Microsoft itself can provide real figures when their income statement shows no more detail than "Cost of Revenue" and "Research & Development"? It's a private corporation, and therefore doesn't lend itself to the transparency necessary to produce credibility ;)

And I would have provided a citation for Microsoft's promiscuity in the business world, if it weren't so widely held that MS is the Gene Simmons of the Business World. ^_^

PC_Tool with his always constructive criticism (yeah right)

...PC_tool....you are definately a 'tool'

gr8 post man Microsoft's going down...

Probably along the same lines of thought as commenting in a topic you have little interest in.

Exactly. Basically, pay a ton of $$ for the super expensive Vista, and now have to pay a ton of money for the super expensive Microsoft Vista 7. Then in two years, pay a ton of money for the super expensvie Vista 8.

Apple charges $29 for a "real" upgrade to Snow Leopard. how much does the convicted monopolist Microsoft charge for a "patch" to fix the broken Vista?

im fairly sure MS knows it would be cracked, considering they left it in folks hands for how long now? and as for activation stopping legit users, how? its never impacted me under XP, Vista or Windows 7 Beta/RC, besides the 5 seconds it took to activate, regardless, zero burden for the majority of legit users

most users like to know they aren't using pirated software, and if they are using it, they use it intentionally anyway, look at some of the leaked builds and their bundled with viruses & whatnot

those users that come across activation issues, how hard is it to call up support and demand a key that works for your legit product, may take a few days but they'll get back to you

i finally bought XP in 2006, because WGA etc, it impacted me... couldn't download what i wanted from Microsoft, some software would refuse to install, not without a few patches and fixes, it impacted me because i had been using pirated software, it was intentional of course and we saw the outcry... lol thing is that outcry came from folks using the pirated product :) who are they to complain? i didn't, i bought WGA kit and thats that, turned Windows legit, zero impact again

"activation every time you attempt to download a new piece of software from Microsoft"

How often is that? If you took a year to download all of the "genuine" products from MS you'd only end up doing it once every few weeks...and who does that?

"plug-ins with alternative browsers"

???

"event logs being filled up with activation requests"

...only if you haven't activated.

"downloading new activation subversion technology in the background"

keyword: background.

"reviewing any new terms of service"

Good advice, but no-one does it. Ever.

"managing licenses in a corporate network"

Couldn't be any easier...

"figuring out the legality of reselling your computer with x software on it"

Legal, as long as the discs go with it and you haven't used them on another PC. How hard is that?

"and many other items I haven't touched on"

...are they all as lame as the one's you *did* touch on?

The average user isn't going to be bothered one iota by WGA. Ever. Enterprises use VLK, SA, etc... The in-betweens have figured it out by now. Really.. It's a non-issue.

What is "average," I use MS software legally, and I'm impacted by those items all the time. Does that make my point any less legit? There are probably 100,000+ people like me across the planet that have the same frustrations or do the same actions. The point was he stated that the licensing was trivial, and my point is they are not trivial to those that do run into the issues that come up. That adds up to massive wastes of time for legit owners. Pirated software users have less frustration than legit owners.

hasn't been for me

Less legit than what?

...any other crap anecdotal BS? Not really. Most anecdotal evidence is just that...BS.

100,000+ users? Really? Care to compare that with the total number of users? Do you think the ratio on that would imply anything *but* irrelevance?

I've always said that activation was a waste of time. It has really only every stopped legit users....

...

...and users who had it installed by their nephew, uncle, brother, son, daughter, etc.

Example: Most of the "casual" piracy done using the TinyXP image "fell out of" activated status several months ago. I would hazard to guess more than a few of those installations went legit following that, either via simply buying a new system or buying the OS.

It was not, as you imply, ever intended to stop the kind of piracy mentioned above.

I just *know* you're not sick of hearing this yet...since you keep posting this same thing every time Windows Activation comes up. ;)

Yet, Activation is still a complete failure, just like your life. I guess that no matter how many of these stories that come out won't deter you from your corporate worship...... What a loser you are and continue to prove with each posting. You ever get tired of being retarded?

*Laughing*

A failure... maybe in your "****ed up as a football bat" perspective...

Of course, you *think* it's supposed to do something it's not....amazing it then works out that it fails to do that.

It is not supposed to preventthe torrent/isohunt/usenet/ form of piracy. Of course, in your limited scope of understanding, that's all you think there is...

...and here I thought we'd gotten past all the "corporate worship"/"corporate troll" BS.

IT'S A TRAP!!!

Seriously though...does this shock anyone? It uses the same scheme that Vista did. The only shocking bit was that it took them this long.

/me still running the RC on all but one of my PCs and now even on my work lappy.

-2 months cracking is fairly impressive.

they've had it in their hands longer than that