billwg wrote:
> The Ghost In The Machine wrote:
>
> > There is the consideration as to whether billwg thinks your
> > testimony trustworthy. :-) Personally, I can believe it;
> > there's been a few horror stories floating around about
> > activation issues. But it's a very weird problem, in
> > some respects; a modern PC, after all, consists of freely
> > replaceable subcomponents.
>
> If you google around, ghost, you will have a hard time coming up with
> much more anecdotal evidence. Considering that there are hundreds of
> millions of copies of XP now shipped that are in the same category, it
> is hard to come up with a valid generalization. If gordo's tale is
> true, it represents an infinitessimal percentage of the population. To
> determine a trend we need a much clearer picture.
I've had the experience once. My father had it twice (two different
machines),
and I have seen direct references.
It seems that if you have an OEM licensed machine and your employer has
a "support" plan, you can use the "company image" to restore and no
activation code is needed. The machine "phones home" to Microsoft and
is identified as a corporate machine.
This is why most corporate users don't have this problem when they are
reimaged.
If you have an OEM license, your usually have to provide the serial
number of the machine. Most machines have a BIOS call that lets
Microsoft see this serial number without asking you for it. So again,
it's quite likely that you will be permitted to continue to use your
machine.
If you install Windows on a "White Box" (a machine sold without a disk
drive, then install a retail version of Windows), you are likely to
have problems. Students who purchased educational edition may have to
reassert that they are students. People who purchased upgrade kits and
used an old copy of Windows 9x or NT 4.0 (which were transferrable
from OEM machines to new machines, Windows ME and Windows XP are not
transferrable), then your machine has to be verified each time.
As Billwg points out, the number of people who actually purchase retail
versions of Windows XP is "an infinitessimal percentage of the
population", for most others, the license is installed, whether they
want it or not.
The "White box" market is about 25% of the market. Microsoft has tried
to assert that nearly all of that 25% is just piracy, but in most
cases, investigation has shown that those who buy "White Box" machines
are almost alway Linux users who are willing to put in the extra time
and effort to install the hard drive themselves, and install Linux
themselves. Nearly all of those White Box machines are Linux Friendly,
and most AMD-64 and Intel Duo machines ar now are fully Linux Ready.
If I want another Windows XP machine, I can get a slower Pentium
machine, pay fire sale prices, and get no worse performance than if I
had spent twice the price on a 64 bit or Dual core machine. The
machine is OEM licensed, which means that it probably added less than
$30 to the production cost, and if I purchase it at "fire sale" prices,
I don't even need to pay for the license, because the machine is
already being sold below cost.
If I want a second laptop or a another Linux desktop machine, I can
purchase an OEM machine and get the "installation media" (many OEMs now
let you burn the recovery partition to CD-ROM. I can use image back-up
media to create an "image", then I can install Linux, wiping out
Windows XP completely, then recover the "image" into a virtual machine.
Recently, however, Dell has been selling machines with Installation
media provided as an option. These machines were designed to run Linux
and the installation media is Xen friendly and VM friendly.
Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't like the fact that people are booting
up XP with their Dell machines, then 2 hours later, are trying to
re-activate a VM or Xen image on the same machine. This might also be
a very small percentage of the population, only 50-60 million users,
but it's enough to make Microsoft a bit curious.
One way to resolve that curiousity is to set thresholds which require
those who are reactivating within a year, or meet other specific
criteria, to "phone home" over a voice line. If they call the voice
line, Microsoft can get feedback. They can tell if the customer is
hostile toward Microsoft. They can tell if the customer is using Xen
or VM. They can even tell if the customer is using Linux on the same
machine.
It's called "market research at the point of a gun". Users know that
they have to call Microsoft to ractivate the PC. If they don't provide
the desired information, they will end up NOT being reactivated, and be
left with a box with blinking lights. Of course, then they can switch
to SUSE or Linspire in about 20 minutes, and add crossover and the
Windows libraries - and have a fully functional Linux system that
performs pretty decent Windows emulation.
> As you pointed out earlier, there is nothing that gives MS any gain
> deriving from such a policy. The linux proponents are eager to paint a
> picture of an evil empire savaging its citizens ala' the Hussein boys,
> Cusay and Uday, just to be mean.
Microsoft wouldn't waste the capital on these measures. On the other
hand, Microsofts CUSTOMERS, the ones who make the actual decision to
purchase 99.9% of the Windows licenses in use, are NOT END USERS. The
OEM agrees to install Windows, and only in Microsoft approved
configurations, on 99.9% of it's computers. To let Linux users know
which machines are "Linux-Ready", a company will announce that
such-and-such machine can be purchased with Linux. The OEM has
purchased the Microsoft license for the machine, and a few VARs will
order the discounted machines during a very short window during which
the new machines are being offered. But MOST of the OEM machines will
even be shipped to these VARs with Windows preinstalled.
The Corporate CIO generally makes the decision to purchase the
Microsoft "support plan". Typically they pay as much as $150 per
employee per month for support. This support is supposed to include
free upgrades, and usually covers Windows, Office, and some other
Microsoft applications such as Visio, Project, and Outlook.
End users can do anything they want to their machines, but they may
violate the warranty in doing so. Pushing CPU speeds, overscanning the
monitor, and overloading the hard drive are all possible with Linux (or
Windows viruses), and doing these things could nullify the warranty on
the hardware. Many Linux users simply purchase a second hard drive so
that they can switch drives at will. Others just repartition the hard
drive so that they can boot into Windows before calling the "help
desk".
> While decrying the injustice of it
> all, they darkly suggest that this final insult will drive the
> population to the open arms of OSSville.
Microsoft can insult the end-user all they want. Yes, there is the
possibility that 5, 10, or even 15% of those users might go and
self-install Linux in retaliation, but Microsoft will still be
installed on 99.9% of the OEM produced machines at the time they are
sold. Linux will be sold on less than 1% of the machines sold by the
OEMs.
On the other hand, if Microsoft really pisses off the CIOs and the
OEMs, that is a different matter.
Xbox/360 was a slap in the face to most OEMs, whose primary reason for
chosing Microsoft over alternatives like Solaris/86 or OS/2 was that
Microsoft did not make their own hardware and was not considered a
competitor. The "PC Gamer" is about 25% of the PC market, and
Microsoft just tried to kill that demand by sucking the gamers into
Xbox/360. Perhaps this is why HP pavillion machines can be converted
to Linux in less than 30 minutes. Why a thinkpad T60p performs better
on Linux than it does with XP. Why nearly all Dell Demenision PCs can
be configured with SUSE or Linspire in less time than it takes to
register your XP machine.
Trippling the support fees for XP then providing the same service
provided to OEM customers for free, didn't make CIOs and CEOs very
happy. Many of these companies had to lay off skilled IT workers and
other skilled workers, who became competition, in order to pay for
Microsoft's license fees. Many of those CIOs, under pressure from the
CFO and CEO, have formulated migration strategies intended to wean the
company away from excessive fees. Many companies have decided that
it's not worth $150 per month per employee to get patches and updates
that would have been distributed anyway. Windows XP/SP2 was more
trouble than it was worth, and most of the promised upgrades (Vista)
haven't been delivered. So those CIOs are looking at cheaper plans,
and are looking at ways to migrate as many users as possible to Linux.
IBM has 400,000 workstations. They could switch to Linux as early as
2007. Thousands of employees already use Linux. They use C4EB as
their primary system and use Windows VM as their "compatibility"
solution. Others use Windows XP as the primary OS, but have Linux in
the form of cygwin, or VMware images.
More and more documents are coming out in ODF form, and PDF. The ODF
documents are easier to organize, easier to parse electronicly, and
easier to manage with revision control software such as CVS.
Most companies have millions, or even hundreds of millions of MS-Office
documents which are often stored 20-30 times in various revisions, as
separate documents, in full duplication. Employees can't even FIND
critical documents that are relevant to their current projects when
they are stored as Word, Excel, and Powerpoint attachments. Often, 2-4
megabyte Office, Project, and Visio documents are sent as attachments
in e-mails to 20-30 recipients, and each recipient recieves 200 or more
of these "attachment loaded" e-mails every day. Even if they read the
e-mail, opened the attachment, and read the latest revisions, they may
have a hard time finding it even 3 days later. Often the only
"relevant" searchable information is the subject line and a paragraph
or less of content. Even worse, revisions get passed around sometimes
2-3 times a day, and have to be merged. If I have 20 recipients, and
each of them contribute some revisions, and I publish those revisions
daily, in a single month I could have 40 documents per day times 30
days - 1200 instances of the document floating around, and if each of
those instances is a megabyte, I've just filled up 2 gigabytes with a
SINGLE DOCUMENT using MS-Office technology. And remember, there might
be 200 such documents floating around. In an office of 1,000 users, I
could easily fill a terrabyte of mailbox space.
Perhaps this is why blogs, wikis, team-rooms, and CVS repositories have
become so popular. And perhaps this is why more and more documents are
being posted to those repositories in XML, which can be quickly
converted to HTML "on the fly".
Conversely, Google archives billions of documents, and can quickly find
relevant content in those documents which have been stored or converted
to HTML or XML. Linux docbook, and OpenOffice OpenDoc schemas have
made it possible to quickly find information in millions of these
documents in a matter of seconds.
OSS was once considered an oddity. Today, many corporations are now
adopting the methodology used to create open source software as "best
practices" for large multi-organization projects including B2B and
Enterprise integration. HIPPA, Check21, and Rosetta are just a few
examples of situations where MS-Office had to be thrown out in favor of
published standards that could be parsed by "anything".
> I think it all derives from the need to assign Microsoft's success to a
> combination of shady deals and good fortune brought about by Bill
> Gates' mom putting in a good word with IBM.
Gates dad kept him out of jail several times. Mom got lots of
political and economic support. Bill routinely lied to perspective
customers. They told IBM they already had an operating system (they
did have Xenix at the time) but delivered something they did not own at
the time they made that statement. It was the ultimate "bait and
switch" scam.
The role of Bill Gates II is almost always underplayed. After all, the
story of a geeky nerd with a squeaky voice who became the richest man
on earth is good PR. The story of a top notch corporate lawyer, using
the letter of the law to subvert the spirit and intent of the law - as
a routine business practice, would have been more like a scandal.
The REAL secret of Microsoft's success wasn't Bill Gates III, but Bill
Gates II.
Without the constant and frequent legal advice of his father, and
frequent intervention of his father, Bill Gates would have been doing
25 years in New Mexico, or 25 years in federal prison on a number of
criminal charges. Fortunately for Bill Gates III, Bill Gates II, was a
master at creating settlements that "appeared" to be wonderful
settlements or contracts or licenses, but were actually so full of
weasel clauses that it pretty much allowed Bill Gates III to conduct
ongoing criminal activities with impunity, and immunity.
> If you can assume that MS
> is run by fools and idiots and the odd evil mastermind,
No, Microsoft is more like the Nazi party. There is one strong leader
at the top, who has some peculiar ideas about people and information.
But the subordinates might actually be more disturbing. Many of them,
caught up in the "Microsoft Religeon", are willing to take personal
responsibility for criminal activities - on behalf of their "Fuerer".
Alchin, and others were far more willing to step over the line, and
willing to take the blame.
> then you can
> postulate that they may do something to chuck the whole season. But,
> sadly for OSS, such is not the case and such is not going to be the
> result.
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