Originally Posted by Cheburash

No one cares. It's a business. Part of the reality of the business world -- at least in this wondrous and magical capitalist country -- is that businesses make mistakes and businesses pay for those mistakes. It's not the responsibility of the consumer to be nice to the business. It's not the responsibility of the business to be nice to the consumer, either, beyond the limits of the law. The only reason businesses *are* nice to the consumer is that not playing nice will result in a loss of revenue. And frankly, I'm betting it was a *bigger* mistake for M$ to cut those licenses than to let the whole thing go and just kill the page for any new signups.

Also? The argument about it costing M$ money to support these licenses is utter bulls%$t. Most of the people who would have even *seen* the blog post are technically savvy and would have needed minimal, if any, support. What would the cost be? The extra ten gigabytes of patch downloads per license?

Actually, you forgot to think of the millions or billions of gigs of the software downloads to begin with. That alone would have cost a ton, considering I bet at least a million people got through the loop hole. And you are SO wrong about a ton of those people needing tech support. Just because we help each other out here in the forum, the vast majority of the people that tried to get in on that loop hole are not that savvy. They are going to be clogging up tech support line, and even worse clogging up Technet forums where the real tech people that do it for a living are trying to fix their stuff. And they actually paid real money to have access to that help, unlike the loop holers (as they will be known from this point on )

And while your point about a company and customer being nice to each other is sometimes true, it is just a mirror to what is wrong with society today. Personally, I have worked service jobs before, and know how much it sucks and when an ******* customer comes in, it just makes it that much worse. So I try and not be that guy as much as possible. I don't get pissed when I have to stand in line at the grocery store (there are magazines to read). I don't get pissy when my order is off at a restaurant and it takes an extra couple of mins for them to redo it. It's called Karma. You should try it some time.

Finally, on the case of Craigslist, it wasn't some blogger that posted it, it was a pissed off friend or neighbor. I remember reading about it when it happened. The lady had just done a lot of remodeling, including things like new cabinets and countertops, and went on a trip. She came back and the house was stripped to the walls of anything of value. It was still going to be considered theft because someone had to open the locked door to get in. Just like in the MS case, someone posted the link (keys) to the door to get in, and we tried to strip the place bare. And now people are mad because the owner wants their stuff back? How does that make sense? Don't you think the robbed home owner wanted her new kitchen back? Don't you think the people that went in and were taking the stuff knew something was up when they walked out the door with the woman's jewelry box and other valuables? Yet they did it anyway, just like a lot of people tried to walk out the MS door with valuable software, knowing something might be fishy.

Drop it already. Laugh about it, like I did, because it is kind of funny that it happened. People laughed about it happening to the home owner too when they read about it in the "News of the Weird" section of the paper.