COMMENTARY-- ZDNet
AU's readers don't like product activation, and that's not entirely surprising.My commentary last
week on the lack of benefits of product activation for the average consumer
obviously resonated with many of you; I’ve never quite been inundated
with quite so much additional feedback from any of my columns thus far. It’s
all good stuff, and I’m happy to hear from anyone with an opinion to bear;
there’s a comment about opinions that could be brought to bear here, but
in the interests of tastefulness, I’ll demur.
Most reader feedback centred on two things. Firstly, most of you don’t
like product activation because it presumes that you’re automatically
trying to rip off the software companies involved. Why should genuine purchasers
of software be made to feel like criminals?
This is probably more critical than many companies realise. I’d wager
that a good 95%+ of people installing dodgy software know that the package they’re
installing isn’t kosher. If you feel as though you might fall into the
dodgy category without knowing it, my best advice is this: those nice e-mails
you’ve been getting offering you AU$5 Windows XP CDs are about as reliable
as that mobile phone you bought off that bloke in the pub, and equally as illicit.
Now, if software companies want to crack down on pirates, fine, go ahead. I’m
not likely to believe that it’ll result in actually cheaper software for
the rest of us, but anything’s possible in an infinite universe. Where
it hits honest users is when they’ve got to jump through hoops in order
to use something they’ve genuinely paid for, and this brings up the second
major complaint that readers came back to me with. Activating software is just
too plain difficult, especially if you have to do it over the phone.
I’ve just been jumping through hoops on a related phone matter, waiting
for a large number of days to find out that I don’t have to do four weeks'
worth of jury duty. That involved phoning the pre-recorded message after 5pm
on Friday to be told nothing, then after 5pm on Saturday to be told I wouldn’t
be needed on Monday, maybe Tuesday, same message after 5pm Sunday before being
finally told on Monday that no, they didn’t in fact need my dutiful jury
services at all. Now, that rather convoluted sentence just involved someone
recoding a few simple messages before feeding them back to me, but it got me
riled enough; if each and every time I had to note down a series of alphanumeric
characters I’d be up on the roof right now, polishing my sniper rifle.
One matter of feedback that I got as a result of last week’s piece was
a phone interview with Eric Thompson, director of e-licensing at Macromedia.
He was at some pains to point out to me that Macromedia’s made its activation
process relatively transparent – you can download details of exactly what
it’s transmitting before doing anything – and that the company hoped
that activation was as painless as possible. Now, I haven’t had the opportunity
to test out how well Macromedia’s activation works – Studio MX 2004
is only their second product to feature it – but I sure hope it works
better than the spotty availability of Windows Product Activation. Hang on a
minute – isn’t it Microsoft that’s trying to claim huge uptimes
and reliability statistics for their server products?
To be fair to Macromedia, Eric did also point out that Macromedia’s version
of product activation doesn’t involve tying down the software to a single
machine; it can be deactivated and set up on another machine. That’s a
decent step, and it’s something that I plain missed last week; the fact
that with most activated products, you’re tied to a single machine for
the product licence.
In the case of Windows XP, I’m still not sure how much hardware I can
change before it’ll spit the dummy, and while I’m in the "so
far, so good" camp at the moment, it can’t be all that far away.
I can also see it being particularly irksome if you happened to luck out and
get a lot of dud hardware in the one system; every time your CD-ROM drive needs
changing (or whatever) you’re essentially playing Russian Roulette with
product activation.
What do you think? Is product activation a fair anti-piracy measure, and is
it fair to tie it in to a single machine? Let us know at edit@zdnet.com.au.
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