Microsoft's activation scheme is just plain stupid

OH, HOW WE LARFED. Techie hack writes story about Microsoft. M$, they jape. Microshaft, oh. Hahaha. Excuse me while I split my sides.

It's lazy journalism to just trot out the same tired old clichés about Microsoft and I must admit I find it really depressing. The company hasn't become the most successful software house on the planet by being a git; it's done that by producing software that works; that people like; and people are prepared to pay for.

I've spent years being slagged off for writing stories that dared to show Microsoft in a positive light. I've spent the best part of a day with Steve Ballmer and he never shouted at me once. He even offered me a doughnut.

My attitude is simple: if a company does something good, I'll applaud them. If it does something stupid, I'll rip them. I'm an equal opportunity basher, as Frank Zappa once said.

So, why does Microsoft persist in being so bloody stupid as to keep on with this product activation bollocks?

I like Microsoft but this is just plain stupid. I buy a copy of XP or Office, install it on a machine and it connects with MS Central, activates itself and everything's lovely.

Well, no, it isn't. If my hard disk fails; if I buy a new machine and chuck the old one in the dumpster; if a nefarious footpad breaks into my house and steals the bastard, I'm buggered. Reinstalling XP, Office or Vista will tell me that I've exceeded the number of licences I've paid for. Even when I haven't.

The concept of product activation is OK on a simplistic level - you buy a product, install it, connect to the MS servers and activate the full functionality of the product. This stops bad people from copying the code you've spent millions of bucks developing and selling it at a car boot sale for 50p a pop.

But let's take the case of an honest, hard-working hack. OK, perhaps that's not the best example. An honest, hard-working teacher. Hmm. Still not much better but never mind. Mr and Mrs Hardworkingperson have an old PC with XP and Office 2003 installed. They've had it for five years. Junior Hardworkingperson wants to run a new game that only works under Vista, so Mr and Mrs H pop down to PCs R Us for a new machine. This comes with Vista pre-installed, but without Office. How do they migrate their existing copy of O2K3 to the new machine? Any attempt to reinstall it will result in a message telling them they've exceed the maximum number of installs and force them to phone up for a new product code. They're branded as criminals for buying a new machine.

To be fair, the MS product activation call centre appears to be staffed by halfway-decent, intelligent people, but that's not the point. I have a ten user licence for XP and Office 2003. I'm currently running them on four PCs, but every time I change a hard disk, upgrade a motherboard or even use harsh language on a machine, I have to reactivate it. I may have installed the software a couple of dozen times, but that's on dead hard disks that are now used as doorstops or laptops that have caught fire and been chucked in a skip.

If Microsoft wants to implement product activation, it should think it through and incorporate product deactivation. It already has a freebie (and pretty good) user settings migration tool built into the OS. Why the heck can't this work properly and detect a correctly-activated version of OS and applications and port them to a new machine automatically?

Of course, the real answer is to junk product activation altogether and replace it with a sensible licensing scheme that says you can install the software on as many machines as you want, provided you only use one of them at a time. As MS products all have the benefit of auto updates, how hard can it be for Microsoft to write a bit of code that detects if 200 people are all using the same, single-user copy of Windows simultaneously? Irritating law-abiding users is no way to discourage software piracy.

Microsoft, honey, I really like you and your products. Just get rid of this activation rubbish, or at least give us an automatic deactivation option on our old machines.

Pretty please. µ

[This article wins the INQ prize for the "George Orwell Let's Have No Semicolons Award of 2006". Ed.]