John,

A good mosh pit indeed! Thanks for joining! I have comments below...

>Man I hate to get into this thread, but here goes. My argument all along has been that MS should do what they want, it is theirs, after all. The fact is, the registration thing is in place, so it's gonna have to be dealt with. The main arguments seem to be comprised of: 'This new system sucks' and 'Who's gonna pay me for the 5 minutes I have to take to register it'. I guess for the former, do you have any better ideas? I'm guessing this wasn't the first idea

I do have a better idea...stop worrying about it. As other parts of this thread point out, no one really knows how much money MS is truly losing due to piracy. Let's say I go home and copy 1 million Windows CDs and put them on a shelf. Have they lost 1 million licenses? Well, of course not. Now let's say I install 100,000 of those installations on machines for poor urban housewives (yes, I am just making this crap up, but I have a point), i.e. machines that would not have purchased licenses anyway. Is MS out anything? Not really...they didn't pay for the media, they won't have to do any support, and they wouldn't have sold those licenses in the first place.

MY POINT IS that estimating losses due to piracy is no exact science. So, do I have abetter idea for MS on the whole registration thing? Yes. Stop worrying about it. Alientating bona fide customers (yes, I think the registration will only get more and more onerous until folks get fed up) is not going to help them any, and even if I were a huge MS backer/stockholder, I would _still_ think their decision made no business sense.

>they came up with. Do you think maybe they hired an Evil analyst to come up with this idea? No, they have been cornered. This is just another step to

Cornered? I hardly think that is a good word to describe a company with a 30-billion cash hoard and rule of 90% of the desktop market.

>take to try to help protect their product from piracy. For the second argument, I guess I don't have as much to say, but almost every piece of software needs a product key. What happens if a customer of yours (yours being a very general statement, not pointing at anybody in particular) upgrades a machine, and has to reinstall your software on it, only, whoops, they misplaced

If they had the key and misplaced it, that is their bad, and no one needs to coddle them.

My issue is that if I change machines I have to call MS for a NEW key no matter how fastidious I am about saving my important paperwork, etc.

>the little yellow sticky that the product key you gave them was written on. When they call you for a new key, do you have to pay them for the 5 minutes it takes out of their day?
>Anyway, sorry for barging in on this, but it looked like a pretty good mosh pit.

Sure is! Thanks for slam-dancing with us! *smile*

JoeK