Vista SP1 may actually hamper market gains
With the public re-release of Vista Service Pack 1 comes a host of new updates including the retirement of the Reduced Functionality Mode.
For those that don’t know what this mode is, it’s basically an anti-piracy mechanism in Vista that tries to determine if the copy of Vista is pirated or legitimate. This system is very similar to the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) found in XP except for one very large difference: WGA only hamper users from updating their OS, the Reduced Functionality Mode virtually renders Vista inoperable.
Microsoft has had an uphill battle with piracy, with XP being heavily pirated even as you read this. If you don’t believe me just jump on any bittorrent search engine and be amazed at how rampant this fairly expensive piece of software is pillaged. In order to prevent such piracy on Vista, as mentioned Microsoft has implemented some heavy duty anti-piracy mechanism. This mechanism worked fairly well except for one problem, it didn’t always work the way it was meant to. At times this system would render legitimate Vista installs useless, and customers ended up calling Microsoft customer service to be grilled like a suspected thief.
According to CNET News, Microsoft with their continued efforts to combat piracy was able to achieve a growth of 5 percentage points in one quarter. However due to hackers circumventing these efforts piracy did eventually increase in latter quarters. Now with Vista’s Reduced Functionality Mode gone, one can only assume their growth will again be hampered by piracy until a more effect means of prevention is implemented.
Apparently Microsoft is being pre-emptive by lowering their growth expectations to one or two percentage points for the year.
Piracy is a huge issue on the PC in general and I certainly advocate against such practice because lets face it, too many good things have died on the PC due to piracy.
- Monkey Island- R.I.P.
Related Posts:
