Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 02:42:38 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Shannon" <shannon@widomaker.com>, "Freebsd Questions" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: [Fwd: [Fwd: Office XP & Windows XP activation woes]] Message-ID: <002801c10212$2a357d60$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20010701004354.B29971@widomaker.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Shannon >Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2001 9:44 PM >To: Freebsd Questions >Subject: Re: [Fwd: [Fwd: Office XP & Windows XP activation woes]] > > >On Sat, Jun 30, 2001 at 12:44:51AM -0500, Virtual Bob wrote: > >> newcomers will also (usually) go for Windoze. After you've >flooded and has >> majority of the market, you then put things like XP which needs this >> "activation code" thing and begin to suck $$$ out of it. > >No doubt about it. They have wanted this sort of thing for a long time. >I personally hate serialization in software. It can be gotten around a >lot of times, and it's an annoyance for the paying customer. > It will be interesting to see how long it takes before an illicit patch is released on warez to take care of this serialization business. Of course Microsoft will move to block that and it's going to create a series of moves and counter moves as each side releases the latest crack and anti-crack. >> I doubt Microsoft made much money on individual sales of any WInblows. I >> bet virtually all profit came from OEM bundling deals with hardware >> makers, with corporate America (site license) coming in distant second... > >True, and there is a more sinister element of XP: mandatory upgrades. >This is key to converting from OEM sales to nickle-and-diming the users >to compensate. From what I have read, upgrades aren't optional. >Given the directions they are taking with things like restricting what >files you can copy, and even what hardware you can install (has to be >officially supported, etc), this is a sure-fire way to take what >little choice you have away completely. > Only if the users accept it, that's the $64 question. At the ISP I work at I'd estimate that about 80% of our dialup customers are flat-out cheapskates. (The people that really care about decent Internet service have long ago migrated to DSL which we also support) I probably get stuck with about one or two calls-from-hell a week from these people (fortunately our support staff handles most of them) It's literally a different world out there among the non-techies, folks. I've had people peeing in my ear for a half hour bitching because I told them to throw away their crap modem and replace it with a decent one or we would cut off their account, because by the time they got to me their history had shown that they had consumed at least 5-10 hours of support time over a 6 month period of time screwing around with their shitty $5 winmodem on a crummy phone line. (and it would take at least another 2 years of service to them for the company to make back what we had spent on them by then) And the cost difference between the shitty modem and the decent modem was only $35. I think that if Microsoft thinks they are going to be able to extract $100 every two years from these people for software subscriptions (which is where this serialization is heading, of course) that they are high on laughing gas. I may be biased because of too much exposure to the bottom feeders, but I think that nobody in the computer industry has any idea of the vast extent of illegal copying of Windows that there is, let alone Microsoft Office. For every name-brand computer that goes out the door with a legitimate copy of Windows on it, there's at least 100 systems put together in clone shops that never got within 20 miles of a legitimate copy of Windows. Today, these systems are shipping with illegal copies of Windows Millennium or Windows 98. But, in about 3 years when the general userbase out there that's buying clone systems starts demanding Windows XP loads, there is going to be such a screaming that every Windows in the country is going to shatter. It's been about 15 years since there was large-scale serialization attempts of retail software, long enough for the software manufacturers and a lot of the users to forget what that was like. A lot of the folks that are using PC's today were loading up their diapers while chomping down a pacifier when this was going on. I can vividly remember the enormous industry that bypass schemes created, in fact my first computer-related job was with a 20 million+ dollar a year in profits company that was founded on a product called Copy II PC that's sole purpose in life was to bypass copy protection schemes on media. Of course they called it a product to allow the users to make backups, but this was rediculous window dressing that nobody believed. Today, XP is a blip on the radar screen with most people purchasing computers, because they are doing the Millennium Edition thing. So it's still possible to have these dreams about being able to move the userbase to a subscription model. But this simply won't happen, because the userbase will simply stop buying Windows _completely_. All they will do is continue to use copies of Windows 95/98/ME CD's until a new non-serialized version of Windows is released by Microsoft, and every year that this is delayed there will be more and more and more illegal copies of those Windows 95/98/ME cd's made. And, this is just end-users. Corporations will simply continue to pay site-license fees for one-time purchases of those OS's and if Microsoft threatens to take away the right to add new users to existing Windows 98/ME licenses, then your going to start seeing wholesale moves of entire departments over to Linux. It's actually far easier for the corporation to move people to a non-Windows desktop, and I think that today a lot larger number of administrators than anyone believes are out there would love to do this - simply because it eliminates the ability of the dumb end-user to stick in a floppy disk from home and load up the latest Windows widgit they downloaded from the Internet that ends up trashing their system. You cannot imagine the enormous amount of corporate support time is blown on putting systems back together that dumb-assed end users have trashed, because they think their corporate Windows desktop system is just like their home Windows desktop system. >The next step is to kill the concept of the PC being a general purpose >computers. You not registered as a software developer? Sorry, you >can't run a compiler. > >I would like to agree with Ted (I think he said this) that this will >accelerate the drive away from Microsoft, but I think the sheep will >just accept it. Corporte America is scary, the way they think, and >people in general don't seem to see the traps set for them. > We have a large customer, a mill, with about 50 office types in it. Well, I just learned that they had to make an emergency purchase of software licenses costing about $40,000 in order to avoid a fine of $100,000. It seems that a disgruntled former employee had turned them in to the anti-piracy group (not the SPA) that Microsoft has set up. What they had been doing is they had a CEO and CFO who every time the IT budget came up, they slashed it in half because they had got the idea that a lot of the stuff that the IT people had been screaming about was fluff. (because apparently it's rather common for other departments, like marketing and sales and such, to inflate their own budget requests) So, the IT department had really just been getting enough money to enable it to maintain the PC hardware, and never had the money to buy software licensing. When the notice from the law firm came in telling them they were going to have to produce the licensing or be fined, the IT manager had a "come to Jesus" meeting with the CEO and CFO and laid out the Facts of Life, that simply there was no negotiating here in budget time - that when the budget figures came in from IT that the company had to cough up the money. I know for a fact that there was some serious re-evaulation of Windows and Windows products, but of course by then it was too late since the anti-piracy people would have just fined them for prior use of unlicensed Windows. The upshot of all this is, of course, that here you have a company that is now suddennly paying the real costs of Windows, not the cost that they had thought they should be paying. :-) And, of course, their $40,000 would just bring them _current_ now all of the sudden they are facing the fact that all future IT expenses are going to at least be double what they were. Now, these piracy audits are really just one-shot things that happen here and there, and overall they really don't address more than 1-2% of the piracy going on, and so there's been no industry backlash. But, the serialization thing will hit everbody, all at once. It's a given that by now the very largest corporations are legal, what they are going to be pissed at is being forced into upgrading if Microsoft decides to stop allowing authorizations for multiple installs of XP on the same user's PC. But there's no idea if that will happen. What isn't known, however, is how the smaller to medium-sized corporations that have piss-poor licensing control are going to tolerate a subscription model - my guess is that the backlash is going to come the heaviest from those folks. It's no wonder that Microsoft's Steve Ballmer has targeted Linux as threat #1 - it's not because of the GPL, that's pure smokescreen. What they are really afraid of is the people who are illegal _now_ with Windows just saying "fuck it" and moving to Linux, once the serialization schemes are fully implemented. >Of course, I think Microsoft may end up failing just due to its own >weight and stupidity, but then, that hasn't killed it so far. Lately >the computer industry depresses me a lot. > You shouldn't be, we are really seeing the light at the end of the tunnel now. It's been upheld that Microsoft is a monopoly, and now the government anti-trust regulators have control over the company's future markets. The tying claims have been pretty much upheld, and there will be some divestiture tht will occur as a result of that. The regulators aren't going to allow the kind of ham-handed "forcing a public standard to be proprietary" that Microsoft attempted to do with Kerberos. And, best of all, Microsoft has finally realized that just giving away Windows like they have been doing for so long simply serves to create a market of users that have now come to _expect_ that the OS and Application software on a PC is supposed to be free - and they are getting ready to put an end to that. While some of those freeloaders will ante-up, there's going to be a lot more of them that just turn their backs on the Windows path and find something else that they can freeload off of, and Open Source is now well positioned for them to attach their suckers to. I really think that we are at the beginning of a major split in the PC software market. Some people may say that Microsoft is engineering all of this because they want to ultimately be no longer declared a monopoly, whether you believe this is your own affair, I don't. But I do think that in 10 years that we are going to have a solid 50% of the PC market using Open Source regularly, and it will be accepted. Most likely if Microsoft has anything to say about it, the 50% of the market running Windows will be heavily weighted with the large corporate types, while the 50% of the market that's Open Source will be the traditionally-unprofitable smaller companies and private individuals, but I do think that we are going to see that 50-50 split eventually. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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