Microsoft Product Activation
By Richard Lowe, Fri Dec 9th
Let's see if I've got this straight. Microsoft bolts together anexcellent office package by purchasing programs from many othercompanies (or just purchasing the companies outright) andimproves those products tremendously. They put an incrediblyhigh price on the product, and in spite of that price manage tosell enough to more-or-less own the market. Admittedly, theproduct is excellent, so good, in fact, that it is ruthlesslycopied by people all over the planet. In spite of the copying,Microsoft manages to eek out a few tens of billions of dollarson this product suite alone.
After numerous releases, the product has finally come close toperfection with Office 2000. In fact, it's so close toperfection that the only significant "features" of the followingversion are smart tags (which no one seems to want and are notimplemented very well anyway) and product activation.
Now it turns out that there really is not any reason for anyonein their right mind to upgrade their Office suite from 2000 toXP. I've looked closely at the new release, and I could not sellmy boss on spending several hundred dollars per copy - there isabsolutely no return on investment of any kind. And as far asthe home version is concerned - why on earth would I want tochange? The Office 2000 suite already contains everything Icould ever possibly want from this kind of product plus about2000% more.
Naturally Microsoft has figured this out and has taken steps toremedy the situation. They have decided, in their infinitewisdom, that we shall upgrade whether we like it or not.
You see, businesses are being forced to upgrade through changesin support and licensing agreements. It does not matter that nota single person in my position at any company that I know of hasany plans to upgrade to Office XP at any time in the immediatefuture. We have to purchase the upgrade almost immediately or wemay have to pay outrageous fees to upgrade in a few years. Sinceit's a pretty good bet that the newer operating systems will notrun older versions of the Office suite, we are pretty much beingforced to upgrade because, well, we don't have any choice.
Obviously Microsoft's biggest problem with home users isconvincing them to install the product on one and only onecomputer system. Heaven forbid that someone purchase a productand actually install it on two computers that he owns - itdoesn't matter that he paid over $479 ($239 for the upgrade) fora glorified word processor, a spreadsheet program and some otherthings he will probably never use.
To prevent this travesty of justice, Microsoft has createdproduct activation. What this means is you purchase the product(in this case, the Office XP suite) and install it on yourcomputer. Now you get to run it 50 times or so before it more orless stops working. You now have to activate the product, whichmeans you let it "phone home" over the internet. You get to dothis on one and only one machine.
If the machine changes too much, the product stops
