WGA: Won't Go Away anytime soon

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 06 December 2007 14:54

Opinion and Analysis

Given the number of pirated Vista copies that are out there in Asia and throughout the world, whether that number is large or small, freezing people out of their computers theway it’s currently done in Vista would have isn’t a great way to encourage them to pay up and go legal, and is obviously one of the reasons why WGA was softened back to XP levels.

And Microsoft must be acutely aware of the fact that the Mac OS X and Linux systems are growing in popularity. Microsoft’s dominance of the OS and productivity software market won’t end next week or even next year, but the competitive threats are at their strongest ever, and continue improving, just as Microsoft also continues updating and improving its software, even if, as with Vista, it’s taken them a very long time to do it!

Even the pain of switch between operating systems and platforms is lower than it has ever been due to the advanced nature of operating systems today and the desire for cool features and eye candy no matter which OS you are using.

WGA and OGA have worked to stop users from the simple unhindered act of casual copying, making it much harder for people to become a pirate, with plenty of roadblocks to come even if a pirate version is acquired and successfully installed, bypassing activation.

Some in the media seem to think that WGA is near death or should disappear entirely. But there’s no way Microsoft is going to do that, at least not in the foreseeable future, it has been a massive success for Microsoft. 

WGA and OGA might turn some people to Linux or Mac, but it has changed the piracy battleground from users at large to those prepared to go through all the hassle of finding out and risking future discovery and branding with non-genuine status, removing features and limiting functionality until a paid for license key is obtained.

If Linux and the Mac really starting moving in double digit leaps and bounds in market share over the next few months or the next couple of years, then we will undoubtedly see some radical moves in the area of pricing or online availability or both from Microsoft to protect their OS and software turf, moves we are already seeing to see degree, although in relative extreme slow motion.

Abobe, Symantec and others are using schemes similar to WGA and OGA in addition to needing a valid license key and online activation to eliminate casual copying, with updates appearing to detect hacked copies that somehow bypassed activated or fooled it into false activation and disabling them, catching pirates in the act and doing their best to annoy you into paying up.

Web apps powerful enough to offer all the rich desktop features of software such as Office 2007 still haven’t truly appeared, nor is truly fast bandwidth and cheap yet powerful hardware available in enough parts of the world to enough people to render retail boxed software obsolete, and surely won’t for at least a few years yet.

WGA has clearly helped push some people into the world of Microsoft alternatives, including open source, but that’s a good thing, not a bad one, causing companies and groups of people to develop alternatives which are today only gaining in strength, feature set and sophistication, something that may not have happened as fast as it has were WGA and OGA not put into practice.

WGA – for now, it’s here to stay and won’t go away.