Genuine Dis-Advantage

Of all the various things that gall me about Microsoft and their products I think that the "Genuine Advantage" program is probably the worst. This program, amazingly poorly named, is in fact the main thrust of their anti-piracy effort and consists primarily of a gate-keeper program installed on every individual PC with the Windows operating system which monitors and verifies the integrity of the Microsoft software installed (so far--there's nothing preventing the scope from widening at some unspecified future date) and--with XP--delivers a series of messages and options to correct the issue (which Ed Bott has painstakingly chronicled here). With Windows Vista, Microsoft has stated that certain features and functions of the software will be disabled outright on a failed WGA check, and it's rather widely expected that eventually a complete system shutdown will result (in fact, Microsoft has explicitly stated this as recently as October--it's not clear if this represents a more aggressive approach than previously implied or if activation and validation are separate in their eyes) which will render your expensive and powerful computer down into a machine that can be used for only one task: sending Microsoft money to unlock it.

It's bad enough that the program works that way in the first place--given that intentional, user-initiated piracy at the OS level is fairly unusual and that most violations are inadvertent--but that the company has the chutzpah to claim that this is all for their customer's "advantage" is sticking in craws other than my own lately.

And yesterday, the queen of all things Microsoft, Mary Jo Foley, posted an article on the NewSpeak approach Microsoft is taking in its attempt to portray WGA in a favorable light. More interesting than that information, which after all is no less than you would expect, are some of the statistics she has turned up and an intriguing study report--paid for by Microsoft--studying the Genuine Advantage program (you can tell they commissioned the report from the first sentence, which couldn't have been crafted to be any more appealing to put-upon Microsoft executives: "There is no more pervasive or pernicious problem plaguing the software industry than that of counterfeit or pirated software operating systems and applications." Those poor threatened software barons).

According to the report, more than half of small businesses surveyed had at least some instances of counterfeit or pirated software in their organization at some point. This number becomes even more interesting when you consider that, at least in my experience, most small businesses have no idea and no way of discovering whether or not they have illegitimate software in their organization. So that's 55% of a small subset of organizations with the technical ability to discover such breaches in the first place.

As one would expect, the report oversells the benefits of running legally obtained software--in fact, absent such programs as Genuine Advantage, there is generally strong financial benefit to running pirated software. Prosecution is rare, malfunction is no more prevalent than in the original software, and of course the software cost is far lower. This may be unpalatable and unfashionable to come out and say, but let's be honest--digital media counterfeiting is an economic boon to the consumer. Which is obvious, when you think about it; if it were truly otherwise, as Microsoft would have you believe, they would never have needed to institute Genuine Advantage or its ilk in the first place.

I'm not advocating piracy or begrudging Microsoft's efforts to turn a solid profit from their wares. But Genuine Advantage is really the opposite of an advantage, and it's probably going to have some unintended consequences, significant ones if the numbers are correct.

Mary Jo reports that only 22% of current WGA participants have been found to be running illegitimate software, and that fewer than one percent of those are false positives (that is, the software is legitimate but found illegitimate for unspecified and incorrect technical reasons). So that's a lot fewer than 55%, but when you apply the percentage to the wider customer base, it's a big, big number. And as Dave Berlind points out (and as Ed Bott has in his previously cited article) dealing with these failures from the customer perspective is no small matter. You're looking a huge expenditure of time, effort, and money to deal with these issues. As Ed and Dave say, and as Microsoft no doubt hopes, the easiest resolution is just to pony up the money to immediately purchase a legitimate license key. But that's an expensive and morally unpalatable option for a business that believes they have already purchased such a key.

I've discussed before what the only real solution will be for the small business: rigorously ensuring licensing compliance. In fact, that is one of the key recommendations in the Yankee Group report. But that in itself is quite an expensive proposition--tracking installations, modifications, updates, either requires a lot of paperwork or specialized software (and often both) and I believe that most small businesses simply can't afford it. It's as if the complexities of Sarbanes-Oxley accounting compliance were suddenly pushed down onto businesses of any size. Another Yankee Group recommendation is to understand the licensing contracts, which further illustrates the gap; they suggest businesses run it past corporate counsel, as if everyone simply has a lawyer versed in the complexities of End User License Agreements (EULAs) tucked away in an office down the hall. Large corporations have the expertise and infrastructure in place already to ensure compliance--they'll deploy licensing servers and use their automated management systems to handle it with minimal additional overhead. SMBs don't generally have that infrastructure or staff with the knowledge to deploy it. To do so may well simply cost more than they can afford; in many cases, certainly more than the savings of the efficiencies that the software provides them in the first place.

If that in fact proves to be the case, then Microsoft is actually pushing a fairly significant (and growing) segment of its market toward other solutions. And this may be a boon for those businesses. It will force them to sit down and analyze the actual costs and savings of their IT infrastructure, and to reflect on their processes and weigh them against the alternatives--alternatives which I believe, in many cases, to be more compelling than the current status quo.

More likely, however, is that the impacts will cause such hue and cry that Microsoft will back off or alter their Genuine Advantage program to allow more leniency in certain respects.