If you don't like their product or policies, don't use it. If you use it then you should pay for it. Use Linux, a BSD Unix, or a Mac. People who pirate Microsoft products don't really hurt Microsoft, they hurt the rest of the competition.
Don't get me wrong, Microsoft isn't helping themselves with this, but @melling has it on the head.
In the current climate, it's this kind of blog post that undoes a lot of the good work people are doing around protesting SOPA/PIPA. For those with a very simple view of copyright, saying you're going to 'steal Microsoft's IP' because you've been inconvenienced is just evidence that Something Must Be Done and the proposed law is a Good Thing.
Certain applications that professionals need are only available on Windows. Most games are as well. Even for software with Mac/*nix versions, a person may have quite a bit of money tied up in Windows-only licenses.
I'm not commenting on whether pirating Windows is ethical. I'm just pointing out that sometimes you'll have to ditch a lot of software to ditch Windows.
If you don't like their product or policies, don't use it. If you use it then you should pay for it.
This strikes me as a valid ethical position, though I happen to think things are more complicated than that.
People who pirate Microsoft products don't really hurt Microsoft, they hurt the rest of the competition.
This, on the other hand, doesn't make sense. You seem to be assuming that the invariant is that the user will not be paying Microsoft. And that might be true for you. If you're not going to be sending any money to MS no matter what, then yes, using MS products helps them somewhat.
For the author of the article, however, the invariant is that he will be using MS products. Since he's going to be using their products in any case, when he is fed up with their policies and decides to pirate instead of purchase until they get fixed, of course this hurts them.
If you want to argue that nothing is invariant, and that the best way to hurt MS is to both stop purchasing and stop using, well, of course that's true, but it's not relevant. What the author is talking about is simply stopping paying for something until it gets fixed; whether he still uses it or not is of very minor importance to MS next to whether or not he pays for it. His goal isn't to destroy MS or make them irrelevant; on the contrary, he just wants a better customer experience.
Microsoft has tried their damndest to ensure that you must buy their OS in order to use a computer. They've done this directly using the Windows Tax, and indirectly with over two decades of anti-competitive business practices, some merely shady and others outright illegal.
"If you don't like it, then don't use it" is pretty useless advice in this situation.
These are great points and a good portion of piraters do so for these exact reasons. There are always going to be people who steal content/apps instead of paying for them but I am sure more than a few people pirate purely because it is a better user experience than what is currently offered.
TV shows are a great example. I cut my cable about a year ago and haven't looked back since. I refuse to pay a premium for channels packaged together that I never watch.
Currently, I use a combination of Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Zune Marketplace to fill my content needs. They provide a great user experience but the pricing structure/availability is lacking. Most shows available on Prime, Apple Tv, Zune are only available for purchase. What if I don't want to purchase them? Why can't I rent TV shows just like I rent movies? I have never been one to purchase and own content since I usually don't watch things more than once. I pay to rent movies all the time from Apple TV and Zune via Xbox.
Hulu Plus is great, but they have a fraction of the content I would like to watch. Basically, there's not a perfect solution yet but I refuse to go back to cable. Here's what I would like to see:
1. Charge me per view, don't sell me the content to own.
2. If the margin is too thin for the rental model, throw an ad in there...I won't mind. (Hulu plus does this)
3. Let the content producers sell their content directly to me to increase margin. This can be done by the content producers creating apps for Xbox, Roku, etc.
4. Make all previous seasons of shows available to me for rental to increase revenue.
5. Use these awesome new technologies to create deeper experiences/interactions with the content, which will open up new revenue streams.
I share the pain this guy experiences. I had Age of Empires 3 which would not run on my machine, period, because it didn't recognize the CD Rom driver and, as Microsoft explained, it might be a 'virtual' CD ROM and that would violate the terms of service. And even though it wasn't and didn't I could never run their software on that machine.
Thus the who piracy economic argument is broken in three ways:
1) Folks who pirate software won't pay full price, sometimes they won't pay any price. So the economic 'loss' from piracy is either '0' or the area under the curve described by units pirated vs actual purchase price.
The loss is 0 if you use the reasoning that if there were perfect piracy prevention, none of these people would have paid for the retail version.
2) The cost of protection adds additional production costs (printing unique product code stickers and adding them) adding additional steps to boxing/shipping, adding additional activation software and its testing.
3) The additional cost of support when legitimate users like this guy call support to have a human you're paying anywhere between 10 and 25/hr to 'solve' this persons install/operation problems.
Folks who have done the math, with real numbers (and Lotus comes to mind), determine that they earn more money by not including DRM on the product. When Lotus first announced they were removing DRM from their 1-2-3 product they mentioned that nothing they had done had ever slowed down the availability of pirated versions but had added additional support burdens every time.
Just had a thought on seeing your point 1): Part of the value some people buy is exclusivity. If others can get it for free, it reduces this aspect of its value.
Windows activation is shockingly easy. Enter your key and when you go online it verifies it. If you're not connected to the internet make a 5 minute phone call. If you don't want to do that, no problem - there is no need to activate for up to 180 days. Really don't want to activate? No problem - it'll just turn your screen black and announce it's unlicensed software.
It seems the author's only significant complaint is that they don't provide him with updated slipstreams to download. It's true - he'd have to make them himself with the free tools they provide. Maybe they should provide public updated slipstreams, but this hardly seems like a valid reason to refuse to pay for the software.
No it is not, at least not for every version. I didn't have to use windows for a very long time, and about a month ago I installed a windows XP SP3 in a virtual machine. The grace period ended a few days ago:
- the automatic activation failed
- my product key is said to have been pirated
- the phone support for registration is now fully automated, and just rejects my phone activation.
- the machine won't load whole subsystems of windows until is activated (you can monkey your way around from the IE instance you can launch from the activation dialog, but your system is not fully functionnal)
- I am searching for how to get a human to deal with the situation
I might be failing somewhere and this situation is all due to my lack of experience, but I am with a CD of windows in one hand and a hosed install on the other, and nowhere to go from there.
This is just one of the worse software experience I ever have in a few years.
Online activation works only a certain number of times, and then you'll have to make a call. In my experience, this call took more than 5 minutes, and they asked a few none-of-their-business questions that made me think that I'm asking for their permission to please let me reinstall Windows once again. This was a few years ago with Windows XP, in Russia.
Many other Microsoft products will not install on a copy of Windows that hasn't been activated. This includes all the Live apps and I think Office. I think it also restricts access to Software Update to only critical patches (been a while since I tried without activation).
While I'm entirely sympathetic to the author's DRM plight, buying the software and getting the pirate's cleaner experience are not mutually exclusive. If you want the best experience and a clean conscience (I'm assuming here you think piracy is wrong, since you've bought so many other copies of MS software), buy the software, then install a pirated a copy.
I usually do this with new PCs that have Windows pre-installed, so I don't have to deal with crapware.
I think that misses the point. The author wants MS to change and is attempting to get their attention via this post. Whether or not the author will actually pirate the software is moot.
Would this still be legal though?
You are still using an unlicensed copy regardless of whether or not you happen to additionally own another copy.
For all they know you might install your licensed copy on another computer later and not remove your unlicensed one.
"Buy the software, then install a pirated a copy."
Unethical, probably, but sometimes that solution is easier than dealing with MSFT's support. A friend of mine purchased a copy of MSFT Office 2011, but it wouldn't work. He called the support several times and they couldn't offer him a solution so he finally gave up and decided to just pirate it. Ten minutes later he had a working copy of office 2011 on his machine.
I own an XP Pro license and bought the upgrade edition of 7 Ultimate. Reformatting would require installing XP, upgrading to the latest service pack, then "upgrading" to 7. Giant PITA.
OS X is actually my primary operating system. There is some software I still need Windows for though, like Photoshop and Quickbooks Enterprise. I guess I could upgrade that software, but I am not paying thousands for new features I won't use. I had to reactivate because Bootcamp is a pain in the ass, so I removed the partition, installed VirtualBox, and installed on that. It activated fine, and has deactivated itself twice now, necessitating phone calls each time. I have probably been through this process 20 times now, with family computers, Windows XP reinstalls, and the like.
Seems like a pirated .iso would be a great place to deliver malicious code to Ring 0, hiding itself from the kernel and becoming essentially impossible to detect from the infected OS itself. I'm sure botnet creators are already well aware of this.
An original .iso would be a great place to deliver keylogging software and backdoors for law enforcement and international espionage purposes. I'm sure law enforcement agencies are already well aware of this.
Not trolling: incentives and processes are basically the same for any entity distributing precompiled binaries, from MS to Symantec to Skype to Apple to Canonical. They don't do it because of the potential for huge reputation hits... exactly like most people in "the scene".
This is ingenious, or else I am just really dense; I had never thought of this. I'm assuming that it wouldn't be trivial to write such a hack, but if you were able to, it would be a self-distributing botnet hack. You wouldn't be able to get the same reach the botnets that use exploits do, but you would remain pretty much indetectable. Thanks for sharing.
This is what I marvel at when I read such (poorly justified) piracy screeds.
Are people insane?
I might not have ultimate faith in Microsoft, but comparatively I have zero faith (and a lot of suspicion) of what are essentially bands of thieves among piracy groups.
I engaged in casual piracy when I was a teen out of necessity, though I never felt the need to invent justifications. In my adult life, though...pirating executables is the domain of the naive or the ridiculously trustworthy.
Huh, seriously? I purchased a laptop with a genuine Windows 7 version because of this particular issue. I'll spend weeks to find a relatively good Windows copy.
The average seeded copy of Windows on the pirate bay or the likes is crappy. Cracks sometimes doesn't work. Sometimes the copy comes with a load of crappy software. Sometimes the cracker changes the Windows theme (not sure why he is doing so). And sometimes everything goes smooth until some day I get a problem because my version is not genuine.
I don't install my OS on a daily basis. My average Windows OS install keep up with me for 3-5 years. I wouldn't be bothered to spend some time activating the software. So far, the activations for my MS products was easy, fast and simple.
I recently purchased a laptop with Windows 7 at a national chain, and there is no CD. If I set up a dual boot, which I normally do, I'll be forced to get a pirated version. There is supposedly a way to reinstall from a hidden drive or partition, but that would take over the entire drive. I always wanted to be legit, but I'm not going to pay again for something that I legally already have.
True. There comes a point where the time investment is more expensive than just buying a legal copy and installing it. And activating it.
I've never had as hard a time activating stuff at the OP, though. When I buy a new machine I always order the restore disks (why do Mfg's think it's ok to not include these and charge customers for obtaining them?), and I've yet to run into restore disks that automatically install the crapware that came on the hard disk.
I, too, am getting really tired of this. It's not just Microsoft though. It's a lot of different companies.
Right now, I'm in the middle of an epic battle with Adobe to get a refund. I bought an educational version of the CS3 master collection back in 2007 when I was in college. I tried to upgrade it because a chat representative said I could, but they were wrong.
After calling their support line 10 times, spending 2-3 hours of my life either on hold or talking to them, being told twice they would call me in X hours and them not calling, they have still refused to honor the deal. It has been the worst customer service experience of my life.
At this point, it's up to some committee at Adobe to decide whether I should get my refund. Like, really? It's that hard of a decision? You told me X when X wasn't true. Give me my money back! Quit being tools.
Anyways, I'm hoping I get it. It's a lost opportunity for them though. They could have said, "Hey, we screwed up. Here are three licenses. We value your business and hope you'll stay a loyal customer." Then, they could have kept my money, and kept me as a customer. But that's not what they did.
Going forward, I really don't think I'll be buying Adobe products anymore. Not because their products are bad. It's that they're over-priced and their customer service sucks.
If you already have a windows license but lost your installation media, you can download it without resorting to piracy. The link below has the URLs for the retail ISOs hosted by Amazon.
The result has been the same for as long as Windows has had serial keys: Pirates find a way around them, they share keys, they disable activation, they patch files, they block hostnames in their hosts files. Regular users jump through hoops, have activation issues, lose their discs, need to phone in, etc.
I'm anti-piracy in general, but whenever I install Windows 7 I always bypass the activation because I've had too many problems going legit.
Likewise with Photoshop. At a previous company, we had a license that would let us install on up to five machines. At some point, we hit that limit and couldn't activate it. The confusing thing was that we only had three machines running it (the main user's desktop, her laptop, and another coworker's laptop). What we realized was that we'd reinstalled her laptop and the coworker's laptop recently, and both of those machines were still activated.
When we called Adobe, they pointed us to a KB article on how to de-activate a Photoshop install, but that requires that it still be installed and working. Adobe said that they couldn't actually de-activate those machines. After some arguing back and forth, they agreed to add another machine to our account (so now we have six machines registered, four with it installed, and two using it concurrently). Now, every time we reformat a machine, we have to call them again because no one remembers to de-register Photoshop before they reformat a user's machine.
iTunes lets you register five computers, and if you hit the limit, de-register them all to start over again. How hard is that?
I don't use pirated versions of Windows so I don't know the answer to this but I would assume it's a bad idea because:
Your trusting a .ISO image from a random website, how do you know there is not time bombed malware pre-installed?
Do you still have access to Windows update? If so for how long, I assume it can't be difficult for Microsoft to figure out who is using it illegitimately since some versions must be using either the same keys or keys that have never been issued to a copy of Windows that they have sold?
> Do you still have access to Windows update? If so for how long, I assume it can't be difficult for Microsoft to figure out who is using it illegitimately since some versions must be using either the same keys or keys that have never been issued to a copy of Windows that they have sold?
Nope, there's a workaround built into Windows because the OEMs strongarmed MS into adding it. You can get a piece of software called the Windows Loader that will activate Windows using this workaround with just one click and a reboot: http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/24901-Windows-Loade...
No, not really. They can check the hashes against those of official ISOs from M$, thus making sure they don't come with extra "features".
As for updates, they can get those too. However, MS might be reading their mail and all they type if they use a "cracked" version of windows without an original serial number.
However, his point is 100% valid. The need for serials / activations is giving people enough reasons to skip buying Windows and pirate it or simply install Linux.
If Windows would've costed 50 USD everywhere and had a milder "security" system, they'd be selling at least 5-10 times more copies.
Some countries have all sorts of big and small taxes which drive the prices of the windows licenses up by 10-40% and some shops also add their own profit margins. Having them be so expensive in the first place doesn't help at all.
One of the greatest features of the Mac App Store is the ability to download the latest version of OS X Lion and then make a bootable image of it.
I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion the day it came out but then had to do a clean install a couple of months later.
Instead of using my out-of-date installer I downloaded the latest version of Lion and did a clean install. No waiting hours fro system updates because my install medium was old.
With newer machines (2011 MBA, Mini, maybe the iMac too?) you can even start the OS install straight from the boot loader. It basically net boots the Lion Recovery image and then proceeds with downloading/installing the OS. Pretty slick.
I'm actually pirating the version of windows i am using to write this. I bought this laptop which came with a super bloated version of windows 7 64 home edition. no media was provided. you can create your own but it includes the bloatware that comes with it originally installed which defeats the puprose. therefore i went to my favorite torrent site and download windows 7 64 bit home edition and installed it.
i know its not exactly microsoft's fault their os gets so much bloat.. but the experience i was getting from new machine was nowhere near the one i am getting after the clean install.
I disagree totally with the logic the article is following. If you do not like Microsoft's products and services (I don't) that is totally acceptable, and i might add understandable, deal with other software vendors ! I do not understand the logic saying "I hate your service and so i will just steal the product".
If you want to make your point just go ahead and complain, send a written letter move to another vendor (I Have). Stealing, And i will call it that because it is stealing, is not a legitimate nor a logical reaction to crappy service.
The entire internet philosophy, IMO, was build on trust and a certain code of honor if i may say (at the risk of sounding corny) breaking that breaks the internet. Imagine people just screwing up Wikipedia because they think Jimmy Wales did something wrong in their opinion or because an article of their got removed or whatever.
Piracy has always been, and will always be, a thing of the internet. think of it as a wicked charm. I will not encourage eradicating it. To be honest i have used pirated software to evaluate when vendors wont offer evaluation options. But then i would go and buy the damn license, because:
1 - it is the right thing to do, regardless.
2 - If i like something, paying for it will support the vendor to continue on making the stuff i like.
I personally do not like the way Microsoft does business, i dont like their products and i think they are arrogant pricks but if i need to use windows (god forbid) i will still pay for the damn license.
Although I don't find MS to be the worst of all suppliers, it is yet an other prime example how companies fail to grasp that the only way they will ever compete with pirated content (be it right or wrong) is by service and by service only. The pirated price is already unbeatable and shamefully, its service is arguably better.
A bit of a rant, but I am getting a bit tired that, still as we enter 2012, what does the paying customer get for his troubles? You don't live in country xx? You can't see/listen/buy online content yy. Although definitely in music and games there has been progress, I could still add hundreds of more examples.
And what currently is the envisioned answer to this flawed business model? A set of laws that will inevitably alter some of our more dear democratic principles. Not to mention the economic fallout.
On a side note, I can't help wondering my thoughts to the teen-sex debates in the US, where some people hopelessly cling to abstinence measures which in theory, work fine. Whereas in practice, there seems to be quiet some empirical evidence that young people, well, just do it.
[+] [-] melling|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polemic|14 years ago|reply
In the current climate, it's this kind of blog post that undoes a lot of the good work people are doing around protesting SOPA/PIPA. For those with a very simple view of copyright, saying you're going to 'steal Microsoft's IP' because you've been inconvenienced is just evidence that Something Must Be Done and the proposed law is a Good Thing.
[+] [-] jarrett|14 years ago|reply
I'm not commenting on whether pirating Windows is ethical. I'm just pointing out that sometimes you'll have to ditch a lot of software to ditch Windows.
[+] [-] fierarul|14 years ago|reply
The worst thing for Microsoft would be a strict enforcement of copyright: people would be running to alternatives.
[+] [-] darshan|14 years ago|reply
This strikes me as a valid ethical position, though I happen to think things are more complicated than that.
People who pirate Microsoft products don't really hurt Microsoft, they hurt the rest of the competition.
This, on the other hand, doesn't make sense. You seem to be assuming that the invariant is that the user will not be paying Microsoft. And that might be true for you. If you're not going to be sending any money to MS no matter what, then yes, using MS products helps them somewhat.
For the author of the article, however, the invariant is that he will be using MS products. Since he's going to be using their products in any case, when he is fed up with their policies and decides to pirate instead of purchase until they get fixed, of course this hurts them.
If you want to argue that nothing is invariant, and that the best way to hurt MS is to both stop purchasing and stop using, well, of course that's true, but it's not relevant. What the author is talking about is simply stopping paying for something until it gets fixed; whether he still uses it or not is of very minor importance to MS next to whether or not he pays for it. His goal isn't to destroy MS or make them irrelevant; on the contrary, he just wants a better customer experience.
[+] [-] nate_meurer|14 years ago|reply
"If you don't like it, then don't use it" is pretty useless advice in this situation.
[+] [-] MatthewB|14 years ago|reply
TV shows are a great example. I cut my cable about a year ago and haven't looked back since. I refuse to pay a premium for channels packaged together that I never watch.
Currently, I use a combination of Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Zune Marketplace to fill my content needs. They provide a great user experience but the pricing structure/availability is lacking. Most shows available on Prime, Apple Tv, Zune are only available for purchase. What if I don't want to purchase them? Why can't I rent TV shows just like I rent movies? I have never been one to purchase and own content since I usually don't watch things more than once. I pay to rent movies all the time from Apple TV and Zune via Xbox.
Hulu Plus is great, but they have a fraction of the content I would like to watch. Basically, there's not a perfect solution yet but I refuse to go back to cable. Here's what I would like to see:
1. Charge me per view, don't sell me the content to own.
2. If the margin is too thin for the rental model, throw an ad in there...I won't mind. (Hulu plus does this)
3. Let the content producers sell their content directly to me to increase margin. This can be done by the content producers creating apps for Xbox, Roku, etc.
4. Make all previous seasons of shows available to me for rental to increase revenue.
5. Use these awesome new technologies to create deeper experiences/interactions with the content, which will open up new revenue streams.
[+] [-] sp332|14 years ago|reply
This is especially odd, since you can do exactly that with a one-year TechNet subscription. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy/hh4429... So it's not like they don't have the infrastructure ready.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|14 years ago|reply
Thus the who piracy economic argument is broken in three ways:
1) Folks who pirate software won't pay full price, sometimes they won't pay any price. So the economic 'loss' from piracy is either '0' or the area under the curve described by units pirated vs actual purchase price.
The loss is 0 if you use the reasoning that if there were perfect piracy prevention, none of these people would have paid for the retail version.
2) The cost of protection adds additional production costs (printing unique product code stickers and adding them) adding additional steps to boxing/shipping, adding additional activation software and its testing.
3) The additional cost of support when legitimate users like this guy call support to have a human you're paying anywhere between 10 and 25/hr to 'solve' this persons install/operation problems.
Folks who have done the math, with real numbers (and Lotus comes to mind), determine that they earn more money by not including DRM on the product. When Lotus first announced they were removing DRM from their 1-2-3 product they mentioned that nothing they had done had ever slowed down the availability of pirated versions but had added additional support burdens every time.
[+] [-] 6ren|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trotsky|14 years ago|reply
It seems the author's only significant complaint is that they don't provide him with updated slipstreams to download. It's true - he'd have to make them himself with the free tools they provide. Maybe they should provide public updated slipstreams, but this hardly seems like a valid reason to refuse to pay for the software.
[+] [-] hrktb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dchest|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peteretep|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChiperSoft|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joebadmo|14 years ago|reply
I usually do this with new PCs that have Windows pre-installed, so I don't have to deal with crapware.
[+] [-] jemka|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggy2011|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rickyc091|14 years ago|reply
Unethical, probably, but sometimes that solution is easier than dealing with MSFT's support. A friend of mine purchased a copy of MSFT Office 2011, but it wouldn't work. He called the support several times and they couldn't offer him a solution so he finally gave up and decided to just pirate it. Ten minutes later he had a working copy of office 2011 on his machine.
[+] [-] driverdan|14 years ago|reply
I own an XP Pro license and bought the upgrade edition of 7 Ultimate. Reformatting would require installing XP, upgrading to the latest service pack, then "upgrading" to 7. Giant PITA.
[+] [-] noss|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcnnghm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandvm|14 years ago|reply
Well, I guess you can, but you're stretching your ethical credibility.
[+] [-] waffle_ss|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|14 years ago|reply
Not trolling: incentives and processes are basically the same for any entity distributing precompiled binaries, from MS to Symantec to Skype to Apple to Canonical. They don't do it because of the potential for huge reputation hits... exactly like most people in "the scene".
[+] [-] marvin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] huggyface|14 years ago|reply
Are people insane?
I might not have ultimate faith in Microsoft, but comparatively I have zero faith (and a lot of suspicion) of what are essentially bands of thieves among piracy groups.
I engaged in casual piracy when I was a teen out of necessity, though I never felt the need to invent justifications. In my adult life, though...pirating executables is the domain of the naive or the ridiculously trustworthy.
[+] [-] valverde|14 years ago|reply
This pretty much sums it up. I couldn't agree more.
[+] [-] csomar|14 years ago|reply
The average seeded copy of Windows on the pirate bay or the likes is crappy. Cracks sometimes doesn't work. Sometimes the copy comes with a load of crappy software. Sometimes the cracker changes the Windows theme (not sure why he is doing so). And sometimes everything goes smooth until some day I get a problem because my version is not genuine.
I don't install my OS on a daily basis. My average Windows OS install keep up with me for 3-5 years. I wouldn't be bothered to spend some time activating the software. So far, the activations for my MS products was easy, fast and simple.
[+] [-] re_todd|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gm|14 years ago|reply
I've never had as hard a time activating stuff at the OP, though. When I buy a new machine I always order the restore disks (why do Mfg's think it's ok to not include these and charge customers for obtaining them?), and I've yet to run into restore disks that automatically install the crapware that came on the hard disk.
[+] [-] ubuntuftw|14 years ago|reply
Right now, I'm in the middle of an epic battle with Adobe to get a refund. I bought an educational version of the CS3 master collection back in 2007 when I was in college. I tried to upgrade it because a chat representative said I could, but they were wrong.
After calling their support line 10 times, spending 2-3 hours of my life either on hold or talking to them, being told twice they would call me in X hours and them not calling, they have still refused to honor the deal. It has been the worst customer service experience of my life.
At this point, it's up to some committee at Adobe to decide whether I should get my refund. Like, really? It's that hard of a decision? You told me X when X wasn't true. Give me my money back! Quit being tools.
Anyways, I'm hoping I get it. It's a lost opportunity for them though. They could have said, "Hey, we screwed up. Here are three licenses. We value your business and hope you'll stay a loyal customer." Then, they could have kept my money, and kept me as a customer. But that's not what they did.
Going forward, I really don't think I'll be buying Adobe products anymore. Not because their products are bad. It's that they're over-priced and their customer service sucks.
[+] [-] sciurus|14 years ago|reply
http://www.mydigitallife.info/windows-7-iso-x86-and-x64-offi...
[+] [-] danudey|14 years ago|reply
I'm anti-piracy in general, but whenever I install Windows 7 I always bypass the activation because I've had too many problems going legit.
Likewise with Photoshop. At a previous company, we had a license that would let us install on up to five machines. At some point, we hit that limit and couldn't activate it. The confusing thing was that we only had three machines running it (the main user's desktop, her laptop, and another coworker's laptop). What we realized was that we'd reinstalled her laptop and the coworker's laptop recently, and both of those machines were still activated.
When we called Adobe, they pointed us to a KB article on how to de-activate a Photoshop install, but that requires that it still be installed and working. Adobe said that they couldn't actually de-activate those machines. After some arguing back and forth, they agreed to add another machine to our account (so now we have six machines registered, four with it installed, and two using it concurrently). Now, every time we reformat a machine, we have to call them again because no one remembers to de-register Photoshop before they reformat a user's machine.
iTunes lets you register five computers, and if you hit the limit, de-register them all to start over again. How hard is that?
[+] [-] jiggy2011|14 years ago|reply
Your trusting a .ISO image from a random website, how do you know there is not time bombed malware pre-installed?
Do you still have access to Windows update? If so for how long, I assume it can't be difficult for Microsoft to figure out who is using it illegitimately since some versions must be using either the same keys or keys that have never been issued to a copy of Windows that they have sold?
[+] [-] w1ntermute|14 years ago|reply
You don't have to use torrents. You can get a direct download of vanilla Windows 7 ISO's hosted by Microsoft: http://www.mydigitallife.info/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-fro...
> Do you still have access to Windows update? If so for how long, I assume it can't be difficult for Microsoft to figure out who is using it illegitimately since some versions must be using either the same keys or keys that have never been issued to a copy of Windows that they have sold?
Nope, there's a workaround built into Windows because the OEMs strongarmed MS into adding it. You can get a piece of software called the Windows Loader that will activate Windows using this workaround with just one click and a reboot: http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/24901-Windows-Loade...
[+] [-] wmf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kermitthehermit|14 years ago|reply
As for updates, they can get those too. However, MS might be reading their mail and all they type if they use a "cracked" version of windows without an original serial number.
However, his point is 100% valid. The need for serials / activations is giving people enough reasons to skip buying Windows and pirate it or simply install Linux.
If Windows would've costed 50 USD everywhere and had a milder "security" system, they'd be selling at least 5-10 times more copies.
Some countries have all sorts of big and small taxes which drive the prices of the windows licenses up by 10-40% and some shops also add their own profit margins. Having them be so expensive in the first place doesn't help at all.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] davidcollantes|14 years ago|reply
"You're trusting..."
[...]
I agree with that line, correction added. :-)
[+] [-] reidmain|14 years ago|reply
I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion the day it came out but then had to do a clean install a couple of months later.
Instead of using my out-of-date installer I downloaded the latest version of Lion and did a clean install. No waiting hours fro system updates because my install medium was old.
[+] [-] jsz0|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgrass|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyriakos|14 years ago|reply
i know its not exactly microsoft's fault their os gets so much bloat.. but the experience i was getting from new machine was nowhere near the one i am getting after the clean install.
[+] [-] razzaj|14 years ago|reply
If you want to make your point just go ahead and complain, send a written letter move to another vendor (I Have). Stealing, And i will call it that because it is stealing, is not a legitimate nor a logical reaction to crappy service.
The entire internet philosophy, IMO, was build on trust and a certain code of honor if i may say (at the risk of sounding corny) breaking that breaks the internet. Imagine people just screwing up Wikipedia because they think Jimmy Wales did something wrong in their opinion or because an article of their got removed or whatever.
Piracy has always been, and will always be, a thing of the internet. think of it as a wicked charm. I will not encourage eradicating it. To be honest i have used pirated software to evaluate when vendors wont offer evaluation options. But then i would go and buy the damn license, because: 1 - it is the right thing to do, regardless. 2 - If i like something, paying for it will support the vendor to continue on making the stuff i like.
I personally do not like the way Microsoft does business, i dont like their products and i think they are arrogant pricks but if i need to use windows (god forbid) i will still pay for the damn license.
[+] [-] nsxwolf|14 years ago|reply
This was true for video games, where the copy protection schemes often resulted in a bad experience for paying customers.
But for an OS, having to enter a product key once doesn't seem to harm the experience as much as possibly getting a rooted kernel would.
I think, in general, there aren't a lot of good reasons for grown-ups to not pay for the commercial software they want to use.
[+] [-] maurits|14 years ago|reply
A bit of a rant, but I am getting a bit tired that, still as we enter 2012, what does the paying customer get for his troubles? You don't live in country xx? You can't see/listen/buy online content yy. Although definitely in music and games there has been progress, I could still add hundreds of more examples.
And what currently is the envisioned answer to this flawed business model? A set of laws that will inevitably alter some of our more dear democratic principles. Not to mention the economic fallout.
On a side note, I can't help wondering my thoughts to the teen-sex debates in the US, where some people hopelessly cling to abstinence measures which in theory, work fine. Whereas in practice, there seems to be quiet some empirical evidence that young people, well, just do it.