Software or Strictware ?!?

A quiz for all the techie folks who visit phd.

What is the software that has the below features (apart from other)
(1) The software will issue innumerable warnings if it ever occurred to the software that it is not genuine
(2) The software would give users a time limit of 30 days to validate their copy of software
(3) The software will give users another 3 days of grace period to validate their copy of software
(4) Incase the software is found to be not genuine even after 3 days of grace period the software will stop functioning at once by, (a) Blanking out the screen (b) displaying “not a genuine copy” prominently (c) not letting the user change the background images in-order to display the not genuine message (d) disable access to any other application or system devices
(5) Incase the user wants to access internet during the black-out period, the software will close the browser and restart the system after every 1 hour system (or something equally ridiculous)

I am sure you know the software by now, nevertheless, its Vista.

I am totally clueless and cannot ever rationalize those specifications, forget about actually implementing the features. The manager or business user or whoever it is must have been really crazed up to think of such an increasingly complex way of making users to be genuine. I wonder how reducing the price by 20-30% points just to make more people buy it would work.

For one it would definitely encourage more people to buy. And think of all those development, management effort you could save by removing all the above features.

But Microsoft would rather have it in another service pack. Their policy seems to be “first break, then pain the users and then fix”.

Sources: With SP1, Microsoft plans to ditch the Vista “kill switch”

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