Ballmer blames pirates for poor Vista sales

[Alpine]

Will crank up the WGA

THE SHY and retiring, softly-spoken CEO of Microsoft, Steve "Sounds of Silence" Ballmer is blaming software pirates for Vista's poor sales.


Ballmer admitted to financial analysts that the predictions for Vista had proved 'overly optimistic' and he blamed the pirates in China, India, Brazil, Russia and other emerging markets.

He said his final solution would be to increase the intensity Windows Genuine Advantage as part of an effort to squeeze more revenue from developing nations.

Ballmer believes that one way Microsoft can bump up Windows sales is to tighten the screws on pirates. "Piracy reduction can be a source of Windows revenue growth, and I think we'll make some piracy improvements this year."

He said that there was software within Windows Genuine Advantage which could be dialled up by the Vole to make it even more tougher for the pirates to take out.

He promised that the Vole would "really ferret through how far we can dial it up, and what that means for customer experience and customer satisfaction".

Of course he is ignoring the fact that a lot of people are not buying Vista because it does not offer much more than XP and Windows Genuine Advantage makes their lives a misery. Cranking up WGA might backfire. More here.

The INQuirer

[KingCobra]

With more viruses and malware on systems today I find the need to reformat and start with a clean copy of an OS more often to allow my system the new out-of-box speed it once had. It's the ONLY sure fire way of cleaning your machine without the need of all these aftermarket anti-spyware and anti-virus programs not to mention the system resorces and time it takes them to do their job on your system. I have found less need to load software on my machine because more internet sites offer many of the needs/services online that I once loaded software on my machine for. Windows anti-pirateware WGA punishes all legal users for the actions of others, "The Pirates" will always get what they want for FREE because it's the challenge of getting it for FREE they love best and the time it takes them don't matter! They also enjoy glory rights of doing it.

Vista or any new product made by M$ with WGA will NEVER receive the number of users that WindowsXP once did. Users today are much more computer savvy then they were back with WindowsXP. There are many more OS options out there that if all you do is surf the internet (which is what most people with computers do 99% of the time) you can do it for little or no money.

M$ needs to find a new catch-all, because their time as the OS giant is comming to a close.