A couple pieces of related news concerning how Microsoft may begin to treat its customers.

The first is this piece of news/speculation from Ed Bott at ZDNet that shows that Microsoft is at least considering making changes to the Windows Genuine Advantage program. This is an anti-piracy update to Windows that Microsoft belatedly admitted phones home, giving Microsoft an as-yet-undisclosed amount of your personal information. Bott points to a few places that makes it look like Microsoft will (1) force customers to install WGA, and (2) stop Windows from functioning if they don’t install WGA.

This is bad news/speculation for pirates, of course, but it should be alarming news for everyone who uses Windows. Not only does WGA ship some information (Microsoft doesn’t say what) to Redmond, but it’ll be mandatory and Microsoft can throw a “kill switch” if you don’t. Yes, they’re well within their legal power to do so, because our representatives decided that the DMCA should be law, and President Clinton agreed.

The second tidbit is that Microsoft is making changes to its Volume License Agreements so that systems using a Volume License Key (VLK) will still have to check in with some sort of central server. Volume Licenses are how large corporations (or ahem Universities ahem) deploy large Windows installations, without having to enter unique CD keys for every install (and without the Windows Product Activation kill switch that exists on the off-the-shelf copies). Whether this key server exists at Microsoft or at some sort of corporate IT server is unknown. In any case, it’s bound to tick off IT managers (like yours truly), and ramp up the rhetoric that many of us have been spouting, that it’s time to move away from companies that treat their customers like criminals, and toward more open platforms like Linux.

Apple stands to gain considerably from this, should either or both of these changes come to pass. It certainly has the better OS, with or without “piracy protection”. OS X still, at least in 10.4, uses just a CD key, and (they say) it can detect when other copies of OS X are using the same CD Key in a LAN. The other place where Apple gets a minus is the arms race that they fight with the “OSX86” crowd, which seeks to hack the OS so that it runs on generic Intel boxes.

Of course, switching to OS X requires the purchase of a new machine, superior OS though it may be. Linux, by contrast, will run on any machine currently running Windows XP, and, if it’s not too proprietary, will actually run quite well. Maybe Ubuntu would be the big winner, as the recently released “Dapper” lives up to its name, being nice to look at and easy to use. I would consider it a very worthy alternative to both Windows and the Mac. (Though I still say the Mac wins, today, at least for me).

It’s also worth mentioning that Microsoft has released a preview of Office 2007, with its radical departure from 20 years of UI design and usability testing. I should say, though, that I kinda like the departure, and am interested to see how it plays out in real use. You can try the forthcoming Office (the real source of Microsoft’s monopoly) until February 2007 to see how you’re going to like it. Of course, you could also download OpenOffice, and see how you like it, and, if you do (most users will find it plenty familiar), you can keep it, forever, for free.