Windows: Serials and activation

To give you some background, as “the one who knows computers” I’m always asked to fix others’ computers.
The last time I had to fix a family member’s Windows setup, I had to reinstall it. No worries, as he had bought a licence of Windows XP with his computer.

So I pop in the CD, start the reinstall process. Then it asks me to type in the serial number. The one that is on a sticker, UNDER the laptop. Ok, a few minutes later, that was done. Install finished in its own time. But it’s not over. I had to “activate” it. There’s a way to do it simply online, but it failed to validate my perfectly legal setup. So I had to make a phone call to an automated service, type something like 50 characters (on a phone keyboard, without seeing them, or the possibility to erase a typo!). Then the phone would speak to me another key, again of many characters.

This was not an enjoyable User Experience.

On the other side

Tomorrow marks the release of the new version of Mac OSX, called Snow Leopard. Apple had announced that it would only cost 25£ for users of the current version of Mac OS.

Since that announcement, I was wondering how they would enforce this requirement. Would the DVD only install on machines where Leopard was already installed, preventing clean tabula rasa instals? Or ask you to pop-in your old Leopard DVD for a quick check?

Apple’s decision was different (shared by uncle Walt) and very unusual in the software industry: they simply won’t check. They will trust their users/clients to respect the agreement. So you simply use you new DVD, and there you go. Oh, and there is still no need for a serial number for the OS.

This will be abused!

Yes, some people will abuse it and buy the upgrade version when they shouldn’t.
Yes, some people even just use a illegal copy from the torrents or use a single licence on many computer.

But as we all know, all the serials / DRM that are forced on windows users never prevented illegal copies. Cracked versions are easy to get, and using a torrented Windows is actually easier than a legal one since you don’t have tio deal with all this serial/activation.

So people who want to pirate still will if you use those protections. Except that this means you’ve made it clear to you loyal legal clients that you think they might be thieves, and you’ve forced to spent their always precious time entering endless strings of characters.

Is it a fair comparison?

You may say: “Hey that’s not fair! Apple make the vast majority of its money on hardware sales, so they don’t care if you pirate the OS, but Microsoft is a software company, and needs that cash!”.

This is true, but guess what: the end-user do not care what each business model is, and has no reason to. He only see how this affect his experience.

Take away

Getting rid of those protections won’t make much difference regarding piracy, but it will results in a much nicer experience, where the user feels considered and trusted. Those are things that count, and help to construct loyalty to a brand.