Microsoft Killswitch?

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It's obvious you haven't thought this one out, Johnny.

Any rent to own, or subscription based way of paying for things costs many times more to use/buy. You don't believe it? I contracted work as an appliance repair guy many years ago for a company that sold furniture, applicances, TV's, VCR's, etc... on a rent to own basis.

These guys were relatively sane in the pricing scheme compared to their competitors, but here's how their markup system went. They took the retail price of the product, raised it 330%, divided by 18 and that was their monthly rental charge. The consumer paid for 18 months and then the product was theirs.

The common pricing at that time in the rent to own business was far higher. The contracts went for 24 months and the payments were twice as much for the same exact product.

What's wrong with that? It takes adavantage of the poorest people. The ones who can least afford to pay extra for the product get charged the most. It's blatant exploitation of the poor.

Now MS wants to do that to not only the poorest of poor, which they are already doing, but they are going to do it to everyone else too. This is a scheme to do one thing. Increase MS's profit margins by a huge percentage. It's greed on a scale equal to the robber barons of the 19th century.

Are you in favor of such schemes, Johnny? Do you see nothing wrong with them? Just curious to see how, or if, you will rationalize this one.

 

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You're jumping the gun a bit there aren't you Freddy? Have they actually announced what it's going to cost?

 

Ummm.... You don't get it do you? When has MS ever been one to price their products reasonably? When the Win9x's were current technology a computer that cost $2000 to build had an OS that cost less than $100. Now you can build a computer with hardware many times more powerful than those $2000 systems for $1000. The cost for a Windows OS though has more than doubled since the days of Win9x....

While all other computer pricing structures have dropped, MS's pricing structure has risen. Do you really expect that now that they have the ability to kill your system if you don't pay them every month that their pricing structure is not going to rise considerably? Any time you pay a subscription fee for something rather than purchasing it outright you pay a penalty, i.e. you pay far more for the same thing.

MS will have it's user's by the gonads. What in their history suggests they aren't going to squeeze, and squeeze hard?

 

What's the problem with this sort of thing?
Targetting the poor? Of course they are. If the poor can't afford your products, you arrange for a way for them to pay which they can afford. You then build in a cost to pay for that service in the form of interest etc.

Credit cards, hire purchase, direct debits, bank loans - all ways for us to pay for things that we can't really afford to pay for up front.

That's the way the Western world works. I don't see the difference between me buying a PC on my credit card or by inserting coupons into a slot.

Down here in Wales, we have 'pay as you view'. If you can't afford a TV/video, whatever, they give you one and you pay for it by inserting coins into a meter which gets emptied every now and then by a little man in a van.

I dread to think what kind of interest/markup there is on this, as someone has got to pay all the little men in vans. Is it exploiting the poor, or is it giving them the means to own a TV?

 

I have to agree with Johnny here. If you can't afford something up front, you either don't have it or you pay extra for the privelige of paying in installments. Although some people might say otherwise, a home PC is not an essential requirement of living, espeially in the developing world, so it comes down to the consumer's choice.

I think that's a spurious argument. A $2000 system in 1995 probably couldn't be given away now, likewise, a copy of Win95 would probably sell for less than a tenner on Fleabay. MS OS's cost double? A top of the line PC can easily sell for £2000+ (that's $4000 at current rates I believe), and Dell are selling one for £10000!

 

You are missing the point.

A $2000 computer back in 1995 had an OS that cost less than $100. It wasn't very powerful. If adjusted for inflation the 1995 computer would cost between $3000 and $3500 in today's currency. That rate of inflation is figured using the rule of 72. It's been 10 years and I know we've had more than 3-4% inflation during those years so it's a rather conservative estimate.

If you spend $1000 on a computer today you get 1000's of times the storage space as hard drives back then were rated in megabytes not gigabytes, and hardware such as mobo's, cpu's, video cards, etc... that are hundreds of time faster and more powerful than what was available in 1995. However, you are paying approximately 1/3 the price in real dollars for the hardware.

In the case of MS the cost of the OS has outpaced the pricing of hardware many times over as when you adust the price of Win95 you come up with $150-175 and that's being genorous to MS as I'm figuring from exactly $100 to make the math easy. That is still less than the current price of XP.

 

Freddy...
You seem very fond of phrases like 'you haven't thought this through' and 'you just don't get it' when people disagree with you.

Tell you what. I notice that you are an MCSE. Lets do a Beatles thing. I will donate money to the charity of your choice in return for you posting a photo of yourself setting fire to your Microsoft certificates.

You are also sat in front of XP right now, so it can't be all bad!

 

That's throwing down the gauntlet! I thought my musical history was pretty good but someone's going to have to explain the Beatles thing to me.

 

Nuts, you've got me there.
The Beatles were given MBEs or some such award around the time that they claimed to be 'bigger than Jesus' or 'better than God' or some such thing.
People burned their records and others that had been awarded MBEs (or whatever) sent them back to the Queen...

 

Well i know a few people that have illegal win xp on their systems and also know of them having SP2 and are able to get all the updates via a program that has made it possible etc.

I spose my point is, if they can do programs for this they surely will be able to write other programs to bypass the WGA.

As for the windows "killswitch" idea i cant see how they could pull that off without breaching someones rights.and what would happen if the computer was sold second hand, would the new owner have to buy a new license??

 

LOL. Whatever makes you think I use XP? If that's all the better your detective skills are you're in trouble. I have never owned a copy of it, and never installed a copy of it on my own machines. The only MS OS I have ever purchased was Server 2003, and I only had to pay $25 for that as I purchased it through a disability discount program. The last MS desktop OS I have run on a regular basis was 2K Pro, but it was given to me by the employer I worked for at the time as I needed it at home to do my job.

There is a copy of XP home on my laptop that came with the laptop, but it dual boots to Debian and I've only booted into XP on it just a few times, and most of those before I installed Debian. Since then it's only been once or twice, and that was to copy wireless drivers over to a FAT32 partition so I could use them with ndiswrapper to get my wireless going on my laptop under Debian.

I haven't booted into my 2KPro install in many months, and I wiped out the 2003 install quite a while back as I wanted to set up a Bind 9 and DHCP3 servers on that machine. The only reason the 2KPro install even exists is because I haven't taken the time to get all the documents out of the system partition. I'm not cramped for hard drive space so I just leave it for now.

As to posting a photo of me burning my MS certs, well, three things would have to happen. I'd have to buy a camera and then I'd have to find the paperwork as I couldn't even tell you where they are. Then I'd have to burn the copies, but that would be rather dishonest as I could burn them and it wouldn't stop me from showing employers my certs. It's been possible for quite a while to give employers a link so they can see your certs. But, that being said, I haven't looked at any of my certs for at least a year or more. I have never valued those pieces of paper very highly....

 

Nuts. It was worth a guess!

Shame though - we could have had a Big Brother challenge moment going on there!

 

You'll find I'm not the kinda guy to say one thing and do another. I live my convictions. If I don't, I can't live with myself.

I have been using Debian as my daily OS now for at least a year and half and dual-booting about between Debian and 2K Pro for about a year before that.

 

An update from Ed Bott's blog on the WGA issue.

MS is becoming more and more obscure about WGA. This is not a good thing for them, but a great thing for Linux as it is going to cause more and more paying customers to move away from MS products and towards Linux.

MS has not been honest in this whole mess. They only things they have owned up to are statements of theirs which have been proven by outside sources to be untrue. I'm really amazed that anyone would continue to trust MS at all.

 

Here is the link to the following response to the Ed Botts blog I just posted.

I think he is probably right. MS is so arrogant that they will even use anger against their own product to try and sell a new product, and that anger is anger they themselves will have intentionally created. If he is correct, and I really think he is, it's, if I may rip off an old Navy saying, "damn the customers and full speed ahead"....

 

Yikes, it's no wonder the ATM debacle -- this bloke (my European word for the day!) can't even check his spelling, and he's a developer of XP embedded systems? That's it, I'm pulling all my cash and sewing it into my mattress

Like the news media, we often find other sources to support our position, and the credibility of this one is a bit suspect. I'd even go out onto a limb and say that most developers are fine with XP, and MS in general -- it probably pays better than Linux. This guy is the minority, and while he may be developing MS embedded for the 'low-hanging fruit of the industry', it's still job security. I used to curse Jeeps everyday, but that's where my paycheck was based, and I have 2 in my driveway even now. Ironic, huh?

Opposition to WGA is fine, but I just don't see anyone else providing alternatives to protecting M$ assets. Shocking, huh? Nope, since most of the opposition are *competitors*. What happens when a third of their profits are being stolen? Will they adopt a different strategy? One would think so. Besides, if they didn't, they might as well move to the woods and make ice cream, because their current business model would crumble. Here's the real rub -- Why do so many take issue with Microsoft being a business and turning a profit? They have every right to protect their product, period.

What part of 30% profit going to piracy do you not understand? If I had a company, regardless of my bottom line, and was losing that percentage to illegality, you better be darn sure that I'm going to try and reduce this. Ya know, it really is OK to protect your @ssets even if you are making windfalls of cash. Whatever the Market Will Bear is a common saying in business, and never has a more truthful assessment been uttered. The consumer will chart the course, ultimately, even though most critics expound that the public is too ignorant to realize they are being (arguably) *exploited*.

This is where I'm on the fence, since some of the techniques used by M$ seem dire. Which gives validity to the whistleblowers, who I generally support. The biggest problem with this group, as I see it, is their extreme distrust in anything, and the uncanny ability to point to the exception, rather than the intended. WGA is *not* used to steal identities, lift cc numbers, monitor surfing habits, etc. It's used to validate a genuine license, so M$ can support it in fashion -- period. Why support fraud? Especially when it's your own product? That's throwing good money after bad -- again, bad business. Oh, M$ is protecting the investors and not the *legitimate* consumer? I call bull$%#^. WGA is very much protecting consumers and investors alike, by ensuring the money is allocated properly.

So, can any of the naysayers provide a better way for Microsoft? Or do they all just criticize? Writing off 30% theft is ridiculous. Most big businesses have LP (Loss Prevention) issues if it's over 3% Why should MS be any different?

 

When have you ever seen me say MS doesn't have a right to fight piracy? When have you ever seen me say that MS doesn't have the right to make a profit? You never have, because I've never said it.

And, the MS numbers are taken from organizations such as the Business Software Alliance. The way they get their figures are to take every pirated piece of software in the world and then say that this is the total loss to the industry. Anyone with half a brain can see that this simply isn't true as many people who use pirated copies of software do so because they can't afford to pay what the software companies are asking for the product. So, does their usage of pirated software actually cost the manufacturer lost sales? No. Because they wouldn't have purchased the product to begin with. Why is piracy the highest where incomes are the lowest? In the US and EU MS, even if their "estimates" are to be believed, has only about a 10% piracy figure. So, their numbers of 30% world wide come from what is happening in 3rd world countries.

There is massive piracy there. Why? Because poor people are a bunch of ripoffs? Because those ethnicities and races are inherently dishonest? No. It's because of the cost of the software and the relative incomes of the people. So, would those people be purchasing MS products if they weren't pirating them? No. They do not have the income to do it and hungry peope will do a lot of things to improve their situation that they wouldn't do if they were better off. Does that make it right or is it a real excuse? No. But, the fact is that MS uses these numbers as a basis for the harshness and invasiveness of their anti-piracy campaign and that is just flat out dishonest. MS isn't starving so they have no excuse whatsoever for their dishonesty....

I can understand the guy that lives in grinding poverty and that's looking from the outside in and thinks a computer will help him improve his lot pirating software. I don't agree with him. But I understand him. I don't understand a company that has billions of dollars in cash reserves using dishonest techniques to punish their legit users just to squeeze a few more pennies out of the poorest people in the world.... That's just flat out immoral and I hold behavior like that in disdain.

 

Microsoft has now had a second lawsuit filed against them on the WGA issue. The first was filed by an individual. This one was filed against them by several companies/organizations.

Looks like quite a few people are more than just a little ticked about WGA and MS's invasiveness and dishonesty in how they have been pushing it. My guess is that this is only the beginning of the lawsuits that MS will have filed against them on this issue.

What I find hilarious is that MS helped write the Computer Spyware Act that was passed in several states in the US, and now it is being used against them, and in my opinion, rightfully so.