Thursday, August 10, 2006

Busted! What happens when WGA attacks.

A break from the jihad news to cover some corporate terrorism courtesy of Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage software which supposedly detects pirated versions. Unfortunately, it's getting a lot of false positives and people with legal licensed copies are getting threatened as if they were thieves. Such antics didn't work for the music Industry™ and they'll backfire here as well.

Read it all, of course, but here's the punchline:

The entire program is couched in language that would make Orwell proud. I’d love to spend an hour in Redmond, locked in a room with the WGA team, so I could explain exactly how wrong their approach is. If I had my way, I’d tear down every existing web page and start over. Here’s a hint: Stop treating every customer as if they were a thief.
A few posts down, I had some sport with the thin-skinned Mac users, but if there's one argument that they have in their favor, it's that Apple hasn't pulled a customer-brutalizing stunt like this. Yet.

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