The Mess With Microsoft Licensing!

[Guest Reimar]

The Jungle of Microsoft's Licensing system is something which also "Experts" didn't understand. How a "normal" user should do so?

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""If you’ve been selling a product for more than 10 years and you’ve shipped hundreds of millions of units, you’d think your customers would know what they’re buying. For Microsoft, that’s not the case.

The culprit is the hopelessly confusing, practically Byzantine Windows licensing structure, which consists of a maze of terms and conditions that define (and ultimately restrict) what you can do with Microsoft Windows in your home or business. Worse still, the license terms are only partially aligned with the activation and validation tools that are supposed to ensure that your copy of Windows is “genuine.” If you fill a room with 10 PCs, each running an apparently identical version of Windows, there’s no easy way to tell what kind of license restrictions apply to each one - or, indeed, whether any or all of those PCs are properly licensed.

The result? Mass confusion. The most damning piece of evidence is a document prepared by Microsoft for its partners in the distribution channel, which contains this remarkable admission:

The Windows Desktop operating system is the only product on the Volume License SKU list that is UPGRADE only. The full versions of all other products, including Windows Server products, are available through Volume License. This is not a new policy, but we have recently become aware that it has caused confusion with many customers. Microsoft’s Windows Desktop OS policies have been in effect for over 10 years and the policies are written in the Volume License Agreements. However, we have found that nearly 44% of Volume License customers believe that Volume License rights include the full OS and 40% of Volume License customers report they have acquired naked or unlicensed PCs, putting themselves at risk of non-compliance with their Volume License Agreement.

When 44% of your customers believe that they’ve legitimately bought and paid for something and you think they still owe you more money, you have a big problem.

The technical solutions designed to ensure license compliance aren’t exactly foolproof. For that matter, they’re not even easy to understand. Even Windows experts are confused. In the last nine months, I’ve read authoritative-sounding articles offering advice on Windows licensing written by two well-known Windows experts. In each case, the information they presented was flat-out wrong. They make the same mistake that all those corporate customers make, assuming that clearing the activation hurdle makes you legal. The reality is that a properly licensed copy of Windows can fail activation or validation, and an improperly licensed copy can sail through with flying colors. (And that doesn’t even consider Microsoft’s acknowledgment that bugs and poorly written code can cause the activation and validation processes to falsely identify legitimate installations as “non-genuine” copies.)""

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[youbet]

The Jungle of Microsoft's Licensing system is something which also "Experts" didn't understand. How a "normal" user should do so?

Read the article:

""If you've been selling a product for more than 10 years and you've shipped hundreds of millions of units, you'd think your customers would know what they're buying. For Microsoft, that's not the case.

Simple ...

[1] Download PClinixOS 2007 from http://www.pclinuxos.com/

[2] the download can take a while depending on your internet connection, pop the file on a CD-ROM

[3] a 35 minitue install with all the windows tools, Office tools, web brosers, email etc all set up and working

and it is 100% free all our offices use it now rather than windows as even a dumbest IT people we have can not screw it up and even our old 486 and pentium 1's now have a graphic user interface and a new lease on life