In article <ep1DvTu$GHA.4808@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl>,
not_monitored@example.com says...
> Could someone explain what difficulty this solves? Lots of people seem
> excited but I don't know what they are excited about.

The license agreement they were going to use said you could only
uninstall it from an old machine and reinstall it on a new machine ONCE.
Many have found Windows Activation to be very picky about hardware. I
upgraded the hard drive in my laptop and Windows XP asked me to
reactivate. It reactivated just fine but that would have counted as my
one time to move Vista from one machine to another. For those of us who
upgrade often this would have been a disaster. We would have had to buy
yet another full retail copy of Windows for every other major upgrade we
did. Some people replace their motherboards more often that once a year.
The old licensing plan would have cost people an extra $289 (or whatever
the full retail version will cost) every other time they did that.

Rather than preventing piracy it would have just encouraged even more
people to do it as a rebellion against what they would have considered
highway robbery. And those would have been the some of the smartest
computer people and best able to figure out how to do it. Not only are
those people some of the most knowledgeable but they are the ones all
their friends go to for computer help. Once those people had pirated
versions of Vista don't you think they would have shared it with their
friends?

All in all, it was a bad plan for users and a bad plan for Microsoft as
well. It is good that they dropped it.