Anyone who works in the IT Department of a large company knows this already, but it’s still refreshing to see someone else suffering through it (not refreshing to see them suffer, refreshing to see you’re not alone).

I saw an interesting article on TechMeme that started out simply enough, but quickly devolved into a maddening foray into the silly patchwork copy protections that Microsoft uses to treat legitimate users like automatic pirates. Oftentimes we hear companies like Microsoft and Adobe tell us how they’re only interested in stopping casual copying of CD’s, which they believe accounts for most of the pirated software that’s on the black market. What always ends up happening, however, is that legitimate users end up being hurt and often train themselves to become closet pirates just to make the software do what it really should be doing anyway.

It started out quite simply, a client needed to set up a small branch office, something I do almost every week. Four workstation and a repository for files, occasional backups, and a shared printer is all they would need, nothing special. Five HP 5100s, a printer, a Promise TX2300 with mirrored drives and a DVD-R was all I needed. That was the easy part.

Out came the anaemic 40GB drive from one HP, and in when the Promise controller and two WD 200GB SATA drives. The TX2300 was a snap to set up, the hardest part was rebooting 10 times until I caught that CTRL-F is the key to get into the card BIOS. A minute later, the RAID was built and it was time to restore the OS from the CDs. Two thumbs up to Promise here, it really could not be easier.

This is where the pain began. Microsoft has a policy where the vendors can’t ship you a Windows CD so instead they have to send you a series of restore CDs. These option-free exercises in rookie programming mistakes are a shining example of what is wrong with the industry. HP, like the weak willed jellyfishes that they are, went along with this plan rather than stand up for the people paying them.

It simply gets worse from there on.

Incidentally, if you order a Dell from the Optiplex line of computers, you get a fully functional non-proprietary Windows XP SP2 CD with it. Dell seems to be one of the few companies that has historically told MS to drop dead with regards to calling their customers pirates.

Shame HP doesn’t do the same.

Anyway, read the rest of the story because the end result is quite interesting. For a corporation that is a Microsoft client, Windows is no longer the option of choice for server operating systems. In effect, Microsoft (and HP by proxy) have walked themselves right out of a legitimate paying customer’s business.

Imagine that.

But hey, Microsoft. Look on the bright side. At least they aren’t installing your OS on “unauthorized” hardware anymore.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, windows, drm, copy protection