Published in August 27th, 2007
Microsoft is pointing to a server error that caused a weekend snafu in which legitimate customers were accused of stealing software. Thousands of legit copies of Windows XP and Vista were identified by Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) validation system as pirated.
ADVERTISEMENT WGA is a tool in Microsoft's fight against piracy, which is costing the software industry upwards of $29 billion a year, according to the Business Software Alliance. WGA forces users to validate their copy of the operating system to receive updates for Windows XP. For Vista, invalid copies are stripped of features such as DirectX support and the Aero interface.
There are no reports on how many customers were affected or what caused the glitch. And although Microsoft fixed the issue rapidly, the problems left plenty of irate customers in its wake.
Windows Users Speak Out
One user who called himself "Mhornyak" left this comment on Microsoft's WGA blog: "You really ought to work on making WGA actually an advantage. Right now, users of pirate copies of Windows had an extra couple days of use."
Another user by the name of "Michaelosity" commented that he paid well in excess of $200 for his copy of Vista Ultimate and getting the "your copy of Vista appears to be counterfeit" message, having functionality removed, and not being able to install updates from Microsoft "doesn't make for a very good experience."
Other users were satisfied that Microsoft fixed the problem in less than a day, although some took a sideways jab at Redmond. "I also want to say, because I know how painful all-nighters are: Congrats to the WGA team for getting things working again. It's not your fault that the company policy is bad," Mhornyak concluded.
Open-Source Advantage
Microsoft could not immediately be reached for comment on the root of the problem, but Brad Shimmin, an analyst at Current Analysis, suggested a broad perspective of the situation that might offer some good cheer to the open-source community.
When you compare closed-source software to subscription-based open-source software or just freeware open-source software, he said, some of the advantages of open source become apparent. "It shouldn't be so difficult to install and manage your software," Shimmin said. "I would think the days of entering radically long key digits and having your machine sniff out other pieces of software that might be running against policy are numbered."
Shimmin recalled a semirecent Microsoft Office version that sniffed out versions of the program running on a network without individual licenses. Consumers, he argued, are fed up with that approach.
"This snafu is not such a travesty for enterprise customers because they are not going to be rolling this out on a Sunday hoping to get everything running by Monday," he said. "Problems like this hit consumers the hardest."
