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Subject: Re: Windows XP - a privacy issue? - NO, Purely an economic issue.

Author: Christopher A. Morgan

Date: 19:57:03 10/27/01

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I am no MS fan, but the issue IMHO is purely economic.  MS has always granted
the consumer a license to use his purchase of a single copy of the OS on one
computer only, and have not granted such purchaser with a license to install the
OS on multiple computers.  Heretofore you purchase Win9.X and install it on as
many machines as you have.  Since you didn’t buy multiple copies of the OS, then
MS loses money, big time.  Now they won’t let you do it.  Hence the activation
process.  If you have two machines, you have to buy two copies of XP with a
minor discount for purchase of the second copy.  Of course you can buy a site
license, etc. for organizations with many computers.  It’s a big pain in the ass
for those of us with multiple machines (home/office/laptop), and there must be
many tens of millions of us out here.

I remember using a dongle with earlier versions of the ChessBase database
program.  I suspect most, if not all, software publishers would love to do the
same thing as MS is doing with XP.  We’ve had a free ride for a long time.  No
more, and I am just as upset as anyone else is but their action, IMHO, is
completely understandable, and justified.  It would be very nice, if the cost
for the second, third license to the same person/entity was the $10-15, rather
than the former sum being the discount for the second, third, etc copy of the
program.

Chris





On October 27, 2001 at 17:59:52, Miguel A. Ballicora wrote:

>On October 27, 2001 at 16:47:25, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>
>>Apparently you missed the part of my post where I said that site license copies
>>are activated on a per-site basis. One 1-800 call, not 4000.
>
>This whole idea is incredibly annoying. Can anybody imaging if everytime we
>buy a product (CD, book etc.) we have to call and activate it?
>A royal pain in the private parts (here it comes the privacy issue :-)
>Can you imagine if every piece of software from different companies that we
>install in our computer or come pre installed have to be activated with
>a 1-800 number? How much time would be wasted?
>
>Of course, only MS does it and only MS can get away with this because is a
>monopoly, otherwise, the market would turn to the competition.
>
>Regards,
>Miguel
>
>>
>>-Tom



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