Another Vista Piracy Story

Most of this has already been said in the other stories I linked to, but I liked this story because it made a suggestion as to why Microsoft is going to all this effort to protect the software (and cause more work for IT staffs)…

Microsoft’s actions may be an attempt to protect its existing revenue stream even as it shifts to a new operating system and new delivery model, said Carmi Levy, analyst with the Info-tech Research Group last month.

With the future of boxed software being called into question, Microsoft needs to work harder than ever to protect its business, said Mr. Levy (see Microsoft’s Suing Spree).

The latest technologies in Vista could be its attempt to ensure that it does not lose out on significant chunks of revenue from what could become its next money spinner.

So the implication here is that Microsoft is scared, because – a) people are looking at other operating systems meaning Linux and Apple, b) people are looking at using products that don’t require that the software is installed on every machine, meaning things like Google and their on-line offerings.

Software Protection Program

While today is the day for Microsoft anti-piracy stories. Here is a ZDNet story out of the UK that talks about people being shut of out of their machines if the operating system is not activated.

If Vista is not activated with a legitimate product registration key in time, the system will run in “reduced functionality mode” until it is activated, said Thomas Lindeman, a senior product manager at Microsoft. In this mode, people will be able to use a Web browser for up to an hour, after which time the system will log them out, he said.

Plus there is a lot more in the story about the ’software protection program’ Microsoft is announcing…

The new technology is part of Microsoft’s new “Software Protection Platform”, which the company plans to announce on Wednesday. It will be part of future versions of all Microsoft products, but debuts in Windows Vista and Windows Server “Longhorn”

and…

Barring people from using their PC is a significant change from the antipiracy features that Microsoft bolted on to Windows XP with Windows Genuine Advantage. In XP, the piracy-busting features only put a block on downloading additional programs from Microsoft’s Web sites…

…Microsoft will continue to check if Vista was legitimately acquired, even after activation. This happens, for example, when downloading additional Microsoft programs. Should a licence key be deemed illegitimate, the user will be given another 30-day grace period to acquire a legitimate licence key, Microsoft said.

During this grace period warnings will be displayed and Vista will block access to the Windows Defender antispyware tool, ReadyBoost memory expansion feature and Aero advanced graphics option, Microsoft said. Also, a persistent text will display in the lower right hand of the screen: “This copy of Windows is not genuine.

Then we get this nice explanation of the work that will be involved to help a company authorize Microsoft Products in the future.

… Microsoft is also changing the way businesses license its software. New licensing systems will replace the current volume licence keys, which have been widely abused..

Starting with Vista, Microsoft will offer two different types of keys and offer three different ways to distribute them within an organisation. In all cases, some more work will be required on the part of the technology department at a company.

The first type of product key to replace the current system is called “multiple activation key,” or MAK. An IT pro at a company can install a key on a machine that will then need to be validated online. Alternatively a proxy can be set up centrally to activate multiple systems at once, according to Microsoft.

The second licensing option is called “key management service”, or KMS. This requires the organisation to set up a KMS service on the corporate network that will activate client machines. The Vista PCs will silently find the KMS service and activate, according to Microsoft.

I really like the last piece of the story…

It may seem as though businesses will have to count all their licences, but it’s really not as bad as it sounds, said Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner.

“It has nothing to do with licence counting right now, but companies will need to expend time and effort and some money to administer this, in the name of helping Microsoft recoup revenue lost to piracy,” he said. “There needs to be more of a benefit [for customers]. Linux and Mac communities will try to make hay with this, but this will not be the tipping point.”

While I think that part is total crap, one of the biggest problems with people I talk to is they don’t have a software asset management program in place currently. So they don’t know if the products installed on their machines are legal or not. Companies “want” to be compliant or legal, but they always mention the amount of work and time that would be needed to do it – so they just ignore the problem.

No doubt they “will have” to do this with Microsoft products in the future, because they are forced to. But what happens when other companies start doing the same type of thing? Adobe is already doing a new license scheme, how long until everyone is doing some thing like this. Odd’s are that every vendor is going to want their own special system in place to work with their tools, this sounds like a lot of work in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More on Microsoft’s SAM Program

Question – Is Microsoft’s SAM Just a Shakedown in Disguise?

Read the story, it goes along with several other stories I’ve posted about.

Over a $2 Million in fines

The BSA did one of their massive piracy announcements last month…

Last week, the BSA published a list of 19 companies whose combined settlements were $2M, along with the requirement to remove the unlicensed software from publishers Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec Corp, McAfee and others.

This is a good quote from Eracent…

The alternative to reaching a settlement with your publishers is to build the processes necessary to correctly manage software licenses. “Rather than wasting resources and important budget dollars repairing the damage from an audit, organizations should invest in real software asset management business practices, structured to fit the organization and providing the data needed to make the organization compliant and financially efficient., “ states Jenny Schuchert, Vice President of Marketing for Eracent, Inc. “Software asset management is certainly easier for organizations that are highly standardized or centralized, but that doesn’t mean that decentralized organizations cannot benefit from effective software asset management practices.. The greater the complexity, the more the organizations must rely on their tools.”

Commissions, engagement “goals” raise red flags for some IT execs

I missed this story from a couple of weeks ago. This is one of several stories that have been in the press lately about Microsoft SAM program and some of their “shady” practices according to the customers.

While it may be a little shady about how Microsoft is going about doing this, I think they have every right to do this – along with any other software vendor.

With fewer people upgrading to a new software application just for the sake of doing an upgrade, software vendors are looking to get all the new software revenue they can. One of the ways to do this is find all of the lost license revenue.

According to Juan Fernando Rivera, worldwide director of Microsoft’s SAM program, part of the compensation received by the engagement managers is based on the revenue they recover for unpaid licenses on software that customers have been using.

Microsoft Leans on SAM as Licensing Grows More Complex

Here is a good one…

“You should pay for what you use, and use what you pay for,” were the words Microsoft server chief Bob Muglia used during a keynote at the Microsoft Management Summit 2006 in San Diego in May. That statement sounds simple enough, but of course it’s rife with complications.

While I agree with this statement for the most part, I find it funny coming from a Microsoft person. It should be more like, assume you need a license for every machine in your organization and pay us for it.

I don’t think Microsoft really wants a company to know how many applications it has installed, they want some sort of “fuzzy” area to exist so they can suck you into some sort of Select Agreement. The best way to do that is make it hard to figure out what you actually have installed, let alone comparing that information with what you have bought.

CIOs grapple with new complexity

Here is a ComputerWeekly

As enterprise software markets mature, many suppliers are generating more of their revenue from existing customers than from new sales.

“To maintain their growth, suppliers need to maximise revenues from existing business rather than chase new contracts. It is up to IT directors to ensure that they select and manage the most appropriate licence model for their business, rather than adopt an unsuitable and costly alternative.”

pointing out that vendor audits are on the rise…

Bill Monk, director at compliance consultancy LOCS, said, “Recently there has been lot more pressure from suppliers to conduct software audits or ensure that the customer is paying what they are supposed to be paying.”

pointing out that the “software police” are out there…

As part of this supplier push to make firms meet their obligations, anti-piracy software industry groups such as the Federation Against Software Theft and the Business Software Alliance have been promoting the use of software asset management tools.

I don’t agree with the next statement though…

But Monk said this was not necessarily the answer. “In my experience, there are not that many tools out there that will do the job,” he said. “The output generated by asset management software generally needs a lot of filtering and massaging before it can be put to use.”

Ah… then how are you supposed to figured out what you own? You need to have an asset management tool to get an inventory, collect software usage information and to help with the software reconciliation process.

If you choose the wrong inventory tool, then yes you do have to do a lot of post-processing to the data to clean it up and make sense of it. That is why you need to a tool that does some thing more than grab all of the file header information about the executables on a machine.

But even if I did have a tool that took a lot of work to get useful information out of it, that is still better than NOT having the information to begin with.

They briefly mention the new ISO 19970-1 standard for software asset management…

Monk said a potentially more useful development was the release of the first part of the ISO 19970-1 standard for software asset management. “It has its shortcomings, mainly because so few software suppliers have signed up for it, but once it goes through several iterations it should plug a gap,” he said.

I think this is a good step forward, but I would ask Mr. Monk a quick question… you think this is potentially useful for people, but the spec says you need to have an inventory – so you must need an inventory tool in order to do it?

I do agree totally with the last piece…

“For small and medium-sized enterprises in particular, what is really good is that it sets out the processes and procedures firms need in place to do things properly. In other words, it tells you how to buy, approve, install and manage software – and a lot of firms need that kind of guidance.”

There is no tool out there for fixing broken processes and that is the biggest issue I see, most companies don’t have a firm set of policies and procedures in place. Or if they do have these defined, not many of them actually enforce them.

Microsoft is going to offer a SAM toolkit

In another effort to help people realize software asset management is critical for a business, Microsoft is going to be offering a toolkit…

The Software Asset Management (SAM) Customer Toolkit will begin customer testing in the next two weeks and is due for a full release at the end of July or early August. It will comprise a set of templates to help buyers measure their usage, understand licensing terms and choose appropriate tariffs.

“A company might have taken on 50 new employees over the course of a year and then panic kicks in [over understanding licensing requirements],” said Ram Dhaliwal, Microsoft licensing marketing manager. “With SAM, you can get simple view of what you’ve got and what you need to do.”

Another Microsoft SAM Story

Here is another story about Microsft and software asset management. In this story Microsoft is saying that a SAM program isn’t an audit, which is some thing I totally agree with. But they way in which Microsoft is going about this really seems like an audit.

What I am taking away from the story is basically this… Microsoft mines a lot of the software purchase history to see what people own, if they notice some irregularities in the information they find, they will contact you, offer to have a third-party come in and help you figure out what you really have installed and what you really own.

So Microsoft is trying to talk people into a Software Asset Management program, because Microsoft is our fiends, via a sort of intimidation process. That is where I don’t agree with what they are doing.

There is so much you can say about this, read the whole story.

Microsoft Exec Downplays Compiance

Maybe some one at Microsoft is listening to me For months I have been talking to people about software license compliance and the value of software asset management, telling that that an effective SAM program will result in being software compliant. But software compliance is not the only reason to implement a SAM project.

Now it looks like one of the Microsoft executives is saying the same thing…

Rivera is now adamant that SAM is not about license compliance.
Compliance,” he said, “is a byproduct of software asset management.”
Rivera discussed the role of SAM in an interview with Computerworld.

I like the fact that he also talks about the need to educate people on SAM…

But it’s part of the whole education that we have to do in the field as well around what SAM is and how to educate on SAM.