Software Jihad part 2

I guess the point of my previous post (read rant if you want) was that Microsoft makes a lot of noise of "protecting" their IP but in reality they are only paying lip-service to it and the situation in China makes it extremely obvious. I guess they want to "look" like they are protecting their IP without really doing what they can to make it pirate-proof.

They don't dare PO the marketplace because the linchpin is the OS. If you don't put the OS on the box you aren't going to buy anything else with the Microsoft name on it. No sales – no profit.

It was a lesson MS learned yet again with the XBOX. If you can't afford the box to play it on, you won't buy the games from the company that is now selling XBOX 360's at a loss just to get customers to buy HALO 3 or 4 or whatever.

My guess is that if they really did put teeth into the WGA and kill OS desktops running illegal copies, they would really piss-off a lot of their potential world-wide market and make a lot of people think twice about putting Microsoft anything on their computers. (Actually I hope Microsoft does do something stupid like enforce their copyright!)

All in all, its an exercise in hypocrisy. They use their copyright to hammer on who they perceive as competing people and companies that offer something that just “looks like” their product and then they ignore rampant OS piracy in emerging markets.

The problem of marketing shrink-wrap operating system software has been exposed by the "black-screen of annoyance", (The BSOA, you read it here first!). Assuming the software can be made “pirate-proof”, customers who can't afford the software in the first place, really can't afford the hardware to run it. XP Pro requires stout enough hardware to effectively run, so that when the cost of the hardware is a significant amount of a person's annual income, you end up with nothing left for software. You can't pirate hardware, you can physically steal it but it still takes software to run it. So obviously the answer is to steal the software.

If Microsoft was really smart, they'd make a version of Windows XP Pro that could run from flash memory and reside in an XBOX chassis. Sell the XBOX with the OS ALREADY embedded in it. Then offer the rest of the software by subscription. Duh.

My guess is that Microsoft when they get the "cloud-computing" thing figured out will give away the OS just like Internet Exploder. Windows 7, 8, 9 whatever is installed and the first thing it will do is connect to the big Windows Live server in the sky and try to sell you 14 different sorts of software service plans like a satellite TV service. (Direct TV or DISH here in the US, I don't know what it is in the UK) That eliminates software piracy in a big way and makes the MS stockholders happy clams.

That's why Google is such a freaking nightmarish threat to MS. If Google gets there first, MS gets hind teat and will look a lot like Yahoo does now, in the game, but a poor second.