I could most likely be wrong. It's a bit of a hairbrained idea, but it reflects the realities of the software industry as I see it.
I don't care if corporate edition it's about volume liscencing or whatnot. Obviously that's the big part of it.
The only important part is that it requires no activation. It's would be a VERY easy thing to do to impliment a volume liscencing authentication server that people can install on the networks were they have to install or upgrade or whatever large amounts of computers. People have been doing similar things for years with other peices of software.
The way things go MS would stand to loose more money by going on a rampage to eliminate all forms of piracy, they benifit from the market share and in turn it actually ends up with them selling more copies of WinXP then they would otherwise of done.
In effect they sacrifice 5% of potiential revenue now in order to gaurd againgst losing 20% of their revenue in the future due to increased compitition.
I am not saying that it's OK to pirate, or that MS doesn't loose some potential revenue from it. I am saying that they cannot eliminate all forms of piracy and that in the long run they benifit from limited forms.
There are other things, too. For example OEM licensing of software. A retail license of WinXP Pro is over 400 dollars on a one by one license. However how many people here actually bought it for that?
Isn't that lost revenue for MS because all these people buying software for a 100 dollars could be forced to realy buy it for 400 dollars?
So even though they have potential revenue lost, they still allow people to buy licenses of OEM at a much reduced price. If they stuck with the retail price tag of 400 dollars they maybe would make more money, but it probably would reduce the market share and increase demand for other less expensive operating systems.
Another example is that Microsoft gives out free licenses to people. I received free copies of WinXP, and several different versions of W2k server, which one of those w2k server versions would normally cost a few thousand dollars. Completely free, completely legitiment.
Why? Because I was enrolled in some computer administration classes at a local college and it was a program they established so that students could get all the free MS software that they wanted too.
Why would MS want to do that? So that increases the likelyhood that people like me, being a student who could at the time barely afford a 69 cent burrito, could get access to software and train myself to use it thus increasing the numbers of inexpensive and cheap technical workforce to support their software in the workplace. And at the same time by giving software away to colleges and universities, and giving software away to students and facalty it's a good PR move, and as a result many places that would offer more classes on Unix administration and have much more Mac computers in classes now are almost 100% MS.
Thus it makes it more difficult to find a person who is familar with Unix/Linux administration then it is to find people with Microsoft administration, even though Unix/Linux servers account for nearly 50% of the market these students are going into.
I am not advocating Piracy, I am not saying that MS likes it.
The question the man asked is why MS not more active on cracking down on piracy. I think that it is not in MS's best interests to get TOO gunhoo on it.
It's bad PR. It reduces their market penitration, and it would increase demand for rival software and products.
Of course if MS could eliminate all piracy, they probably would, but they can't. They could probably reduce it by a large margin, but whatever.
I am just curious.
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