The Recursive ISV

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Yesterday Mike Wilson published a timely article on the latest validation Microsoft are releasing for Windows XP.  Argued to be the most most pirated operating system in history.  If you keep up with various tech alerts, and you should, you’d know that this was coming.  It’s set to be a doozy. 

Microsoft learnt a lot from their first effort in doing this and this version is designed to be a lot harder to circumvent as it’s built to be adaptable.  Now you don’t have to be Nostradamus to foresee the resounding howls of anguish and anger  that will be heard as a result of this strategy.  But for my part I have only one thing to say on it as a concept:

“Way to go Microsoft!”

Yep.  Absolutely.  If you think it’s good to be a “pirate” then I admit I think it’s fan-bloody-tastic that you end up in operating system hell with this.  True, regretfully there will be innocent victims caught by the unscrupulous who install and sell invalid licenses.  But that’s not Microsoft’s fault.  That’s the fault of the pirate selling it - and it needs to be said, to a large extent the person buying it.  Don’t buy licenses off eBay, for starters..  Microsoft have a set of pages dedicated to the subject in order to help you choose properly.  Click here if you need this information.

So Jolly Rogers - lame, dark or fair, prepare to work the plank!

As Mike pointed out here’s what you’re likely to expect (and I’ve already confirmed this via tech alerts and my own research):

1. Your desktop background will be changed to a plain black background.  You can change it back manually, but every 60 minutes the background will default itself to being plain black.
2. You’ll get pop-up notifications telling you that “You may be a victim of software counterfeiting.”
3. The same notification will be permanently displayed on your desktop background, just above the system tray.

Now, sure, “Ingrates Anonymous” (the cracking “scene”) will release hacks for this.  No question about that.  But the beauty of this, reportedly, this time is that the system is built to learn, similar to the way smarter ISV’s develop their licensing technology.

For heavens’s sake.  Buy a bloody legal copy and stop wasting everybody’s’ time - including your own!!!

Which brings me to the headline of this post.

Internet Explorer 6

And 5.0 and 4.0.  I’m having a “bad image weekend”.  I spent a goodly amount of time rendering some beautiful images for the MixAction website only to learn that IE6 and it’s imbecilic ancestors screw them up horrifically.  IE7 has it’s problems, but they display nice enough in that.  But not IE6 because PNG alpha blending and transparency support - nix, nada.

Now, I’d love to say I don’t care.  But I have to because this useless antiquated bug ridden garbage, with security holes you can drive a B-Double through, is still widely used.

I’ve got to wonder why.  Then it hit me, and yes I do know not everybody is going to be using it for this reason - but a hell of a lot will be.  It’s this.

Genuine Advantage from Microsoft meant no upgrade to IE7 if you’re running a non genuine version of Windows!  Are the huge IE6 figures we are seeing in our server logs due to the fact that people are using IE6 because they can’t upgrade to IE7? 

I mean, why would you want to use an ancient piece of software that has website drive by attacks written specifically to target it?

It’s CSS support is cruddy, it’s Java support is cruddy, it’s PNG support is cruddy, it’s utter rubbish by 2008 browser standards. Remember it was released  August 27, 2001.

OK, some folks have argued, maybe rightly so, on this blog, that they don’t like IE7 or it slows down their OS (I refute the latter argument, buy more RAM and get a faster CPU).  But there are alternatives that are not “intrusive”.  Firefox is free and pretty good all round, Safari is available for Windows, is free and is very fast in rendering (probably faster than IE and Firefox) pages. 

There is simply no excuse to keep clinging to yesterdays technology.  Richard Stallman might like reading website’s in a  text only browser, but most ISV’s have no desire to sell software to Richard Stallman.  Software and computers in general is a pace industry.  Fall behind in the pace and it’s you - not the industry - that’s at fault. 

If you can’t handle that reality - go back to paper notebooks.  It’s that simple.  It’s always been that way in this industry.  There is zero chance of it changing.  If the mountain won’t come to you - and all that stuff…

Maybe I’m wrong on this conclusion, and again I state that I certainly won’t be in all instances, but my gut tells me it’s so in an overwhelming number of instances.  If indeed this is the reason for lack of uptake on IE7 (and soon IE8)  then I’m hoping the latest XP validation round proves to be more painful than the scumbags can stand!

What do you think?

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
The average person thinks he isn’t. - Father Larry Lorenzoni

Not had a lot of time this week to write, life and coding getting in the way and a heck of a lot of work done on MixAction’s website. More on that in the coming weeks.

I’ve also been rather busy with the blog feed thieves, mostly cruddy porn sites and get rich quick sites - so some IP based redirects should be assisting them in their content splogging.

So as it’s late and almost the weekend (family time only), I thought I’d pass on some freebie goodness from my good friend Dave Collins.  Dave runs a marketing software consultancy business for ISV’s and has been doing so for over a decade.  He won my full respect a long time ago.

So pop over and check out his Google  AdWords Cheat-Sheet and some PowerPoint slide shows from the Software Industry Conference last July that he presented.  You’ll need either Office 2007 or the viewer available from Microsoft if you haven’t got it (free download) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=048DC840-14E1-467D-8DCA-19D2A8FD7485&displaylang=en

I’ll do my best to make up for the less than stellar posting performance this week after I return from the weekend…

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs. - Christopher Hampton