I just saw this post on Jeff’s blog titled “Today's "up yours" note to Microsoft,” and he raises a very valid point.
The question I’d like to ask is, even if I’m buying from an OEM, since when has any piece of software been tied to my hardware? Doesn’t matter if it’s the operating system, or a particular application, or whatever.
Now, I think theirs is a (reasonably) noble cause. They want to stop OEMs from purchasing only a few licence keys and then reusing the same key on thousands of machines. That’s a good thing – much better than trying to stop me (the end user) from lending my Windows XP CD to someone else. It’s just as illegal, but I’m not hurting Microsoft’s back pocket as much as the OEM who pirates Windows thousands of times.
Back when I was in Uni, I bought a student copy of 3D Studio MAX (I don’t know why, but I had delusions of artistic aptitude. Clearly, though, it didn’t really pan out). Anyway, their anti-piracy method required a hardware dongle that I plugged into my parallel port (obviously, I could then plug my printer into the dongle and use it as well). The software wouldn’t run if I didn’t have the dongle plugged in.
Why don’t they do something like this? After all, they could do it so that the dongle was just something you plugged into a USB slot (for example), and then they could let you plug other USB devices into it as well. So the OEM to make it look (from the outside of the case) that there was nothing there. But those of us technically savvy enough to know how to update a motherboard, will also know to move the dongle to the new one as well.
I think the reason they don’t do something like this is simply because the number of people who run OEM copies of Windows and who also know how to upgrade their motherboards are exceedingly rare. The only OEM copy of Windows I own is for my laptop (because that’s the only OEM computer I own). Weighed against the cost of implementing it (after all, there are millions of copies of Windows sold to OEMs) and it’s just not a financially viable option. So why did I even mention it? *sigh*