A friend of mine who is very much into building his own PC and other gadgets bought a PC from a store CKD (complete knock down). In other words, it is a complete PC with Window OS and all but totally unassembled. A few days after he had assembled the PC and added the applications he needed, he realized that the motherboard he selected is incompatible with an application he needed and had to swap it for another. Everything went smoothly with the new setup until he tried re-activating Windows. As the very license key was activated a few days earlier using the previous motherboard, he could not activate Windows in the new setup using the same license key. So he had to call Microsoft and was given a stern warning before being issued a re-activation key.
I think one can understand that Microsoft need to protect their product from being pirated and no one can blame them for putting all the necessary steps in place to look after their interest. But the whole experience left such a bad after taste in this friend, he started to switched his machines to linux! As he is very much a technical geek that friends and relatives consult before buying, I feel that this is a lost for Microsoft! It will be an even bigger lost when he get into the position to influence the platform direction on development work at his workplace in the future.
Someone once told me that "locks are only good for keeping the honest fellow out!" To be fair, it also good at keeping the opportunist thief out as well. The steps needed to re-active a genius Windows license feels like a "complex lock." It seems more stringent than the license key management for EDA tools that costs a few order of magnitude more. Accordingly, I feel that the extend of the complexity of these locks is rather important in that it should not put off the genuine customers and that a good balance be employed.
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