🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <stephenj.91.00292182@mindspring.com>,
Stephen Johnston Jr. <stephenj@mindspring.com> wrote:

>	Reasons MS Would Not Use The Registration Wizard to Do This:
>1. They can get the marketing analysis from other sources.

They could get much more data and much more accurate data from the
users' computers.  For one thing, the response rate to surveys is
incredibly low -- something like 1-2%.  For another thing, they can get
all kinds of information that users would have a difficult time providing.
They could easily keep track of not just what software you have, but when
you last used it, the number of documents you create with it, etc.  Let's
also not forget that they can keep track of all the Internet access you do
through MSN without having to do anything sneaky as far as transferring
data from your computer to them.  They get that for free, and that's a 
very hot area right now.  Marketing information is *extremely* valuable to 
big corporations.  Many stores give 5-15% discounts on everything you buy 
just for the privilege of knowing what you bought.


>2. The need to catch pirate copies of software on the home level is rather 
>small.

On the contrary, piracy is absolutely *rampant*.  It's futile to try and 
prosecute pirates, but why would MS want to anyway?  That doesn't make
them any money.  Now suppose that they target pirates with
too-good-to-pass-up deals on the software they pirated?  They could make a
*fortune* off that, without having to lose money by selling at those
prices to people who would have paid full price.


>3. The fact that regardless of the method "someone" could find out what they 
>are doing is a strong reason not to do it. MS knows that there are very 
>powerful companies that would like to BURY them. IBM with a copy of Win95 
>could find anything they needed to in a fairly short time. If I was IBM I 
>would search every possible avenue to exploit something like this and then be 
>very sorry that there was a "leak" to the media before we could inform MS that 
>they had "accidentally" included this in Win95.

The fact is that MS is so rich and powerful that nothing would happen even
if they were caught.  Do you really think any incident like that would
make a significant long-term impact on MS?  Do you think everyone would  
suddenly switch to Macs or to OS/2?  MS could easily handle the situation
and everyone would have forgotten about it before you know it.


>4. The information that is on the average computer is not worth crap. So what 
>if they know you have a 1.o gig hard drive. How dows that help them.

You'd be suprised.  Knowing Microsoft, they'd show how their software
increases the sales of larger hard disks and get the hard disk
manufacturers to give them a percentage of every hard disk they sell by 
threatening to make their software smaller and more efficient if they
didn't :-)


>In the end however it all comes down to speculation. They could do this type 
>of thing is they so desired. What you must ask yourself is what do they seek 
>to gain and what do they seek to lose if they are found out. The fact that 
>this thread has held out is proof that the consumers would be very pissed if 
>this was true.

All-in-all a pretty reasonable response.  I agree with the questions you 
think we should be looking at but not your answers to them :-)

--
Steve Kanefsky