New
#10
The only people I knew who had trouble with WGA and loved to bitch about it... were exactly the people who pirated their Windows. Actually, the smarter pirates weren't caught, but you can't completely stop piracy anyway and this did work to nail the small timers and the stupid.
Yes, I know there were plenty of shops which preinstalled warezed versions for the home user here in Southeast Asia (but you don't come from here do you?), but guess what - this initiative worked. A couple years back nearly any shop you walked into would sell you a lemon. You'd go home with your new box and run updates, and get screwed. Nowadays you can pretty much safely be assured you'll be getting a properly licensed installation.
The way I see it, it stopped shops from ripping home users off.
There's this article showing that activation was somewhat easy to get around
Confessions of a Windows 7 pirate | ZDNet
But I also read that Office is going to be more of a cloud thing in the future. And this was somewhat prompted by Open Office. I have it and it does just about everything Office does except Access. And it's free
I wonder if they will ever realize that
1. With pirated programs, there is no less features than the "genuine advantage" one
and
2. They will never be able to stop piracy.
They realize it now, but they have to at least try. The alternative is to produce one copy of an operating system or other software program, release it on the net, and let people have at it.
That sounds like a great business model for a multi-national company with over 80,000 employees and subsidiaries in over 100 countries.