Microsoft Nagware ticks off the Chinese

[thewayne]

Heh. China is a major pirating nation, and MS is ratcheting up their "Genuine Advantage" systems to annoy the heck out of people who pirate their software. Apparently the people who pirate their software are not very happy about their desktop wallpaper being reset or occasional message boxes annoying them that their software hasn't passed validation yet.

I am amused.

But let me rant briefly.

I'm writing this on a Mac. I do not use Microsoft Office for Mac because they don't have Access, so I use the free software NeoOffice. I have Windows XP running on it via Parallels, which has Office XP and SQL Server 2008, 2005, and 2000: all licensed. I think MS charges too much for its operating system, but they're free to charge what the market will bear and people can choose alternatives or to steal it.

But I definitely hate their "Genuine Advantage" systems.

I still use Windows at work daily, it's what I earn a living on. And it's a pain in the butt when I have to reboot my computer to install updates, and right now my computer won't update because of a configuration issue!

*sigh* Definitely a love/hate relationship. I'm just glad that I don't have to mess with Vista, my two days of using it this week in a training class were enough to make me further appreciate XP and my Mac.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/10/microsoft-peeve.html

Comments

[silveradept]

And here I thought that the shareware/nagware trend had fallen out of fashion. Leave it to Microsoft to keep the idea alive.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Apparently nagware never falls out of fashion. Their OS and Office are the most pirated software going in both volume and dollar amount, but anti-piracy enforcement in places like China is almost non-existant because their economies can't afford the retail price of the software. Thus you have places like Brazil where Linux and Open Office is becoming the national standard.

Incidentally, Open Office just launched their 3.0 version with support for Office Vista's new DocX extensions.

[silveradept]

That's interesting. Should I be very happy-happy joy-joy about it?

And I hope the packages make it into the upcoming Ubuntu release. If not, I hope they're available not too soon afterward. Version upgrades are usually trustable in the OpenOffice sphere.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

They apparently made a lot of good updates to it, I haven't downloaded it yet but expect to soon.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/13/1211224

[silveradept]

Looks like there's a lot of new stuff, and things are moving a little faster than usual. That will certainly help me out for those days when I need to compose stuff (or keep track of it).