Today was a tough day, but one that drove home an important object lesson.

The day is coming when Apple learns that creating a big splash with new product is not entirely about surprising your prospective customer base. Wowing people is a good thing. But making a product they can live with is what it's about.

Over the years, Steve Jobs and Apple's various design and engineering teams have shown a willingness to compromise the full breadth of its users' needs to make a point. Perhaps no product exemplifies that better than the MacBook Air.

There are two main types of Windows users in the world. Which kind are you: Windows XP or Windows Vista?

When Computerworld reporter Gregg Keizer broke the story over the weekend that Microsoft had a 19-hour server outage that caused the WGA validation of many Windows Vista and XP users to fail, resulting in WGA Notifications accusing them software piracy, I frankly thought little of it. It was just one more example of the erosion of the user experience for honest paying customers that Microsoft appears to be cavalier about. It was a spit in the bucket. Today, though, I sat down to look at the article more closely, read through the user comments, check out Gregg's follow-up story and I found my blood starting to boil.

Over the last year or two, I've written frequently about what's wrong with Microsoft's evolving antipiracy tools, which go by various names — the most recognizable of which is Windows Genuine Advantage, or WGA. I won't bore you with my past articles on the point, but suffice it to say that WGA was one of three or four main reasons I opted to move away from Windows and adopt the Macintosh almost a year ago. After four years of reviewing Vista alphas and betas, including several stories that appeared on Computerworld, I'd had my fill of Microsoft's deep focus on corporate revenues coming at the expense of the user experience for honest end-users and corporate customers.

Fighting software pirates is an acceptable goal for software development companies. Eroding the user experience for paying customers in the process ... that doesn't work for me. Not everyone can vote by switching. I could, so I did.

Hey, storage pros! What if you were given a blank slate upon which to create a storage system for a rising, successful dot-com heavily involved in supporting user-generated content? What storage solution would you design?

That was the project facing eHarmony's vice president, technology, Mark Douglas, who presented here at Storage Networking World today. In April of 2005, eHarmony's storage needs were contained in 1TB. Two years later, the online dating and relationship company, launched in 2000, has an online storage capacity of 100TB.

There was a time when Microsoft was an honorable company. It's getting more and more difficult to resolve any such notion with the 2006 version of the software giant.

In its latest bad decision, detailed in the Computerworld story, Vista and Longhorn to get new antipiracy measures, reported by Eric Lai, Microsoft has decided to place a price tag on security.

If validation code, written by Microsoft, decides that your installation of Windows Vista has been pirated, it turns off the Aero interface and a minor performance technology called ReadyBoost. I'm okay with that. But I am absolutely not okay with the third punitive measure: The disabling of Windows Defender, Microsoft's new onboard anti-spyware utility. Other punitive measures according to published reports include the disabling of Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Media Player. After 30 days, unvalidated copies of Vista will move into "reduced functionality mode," which has been likened by insiders to be something like Safe Mode.

Most people using "pirated" software have absolutely no idea that's the case. Opening up their PCs to Trojans, spyware, and identify theft scams in the name of getting them to pay up on their copy of Windows Vista is not only a very bad business decision, it's an appalling example of just how far Microsoft is willing to go to stuff its corporate coffers.

The true irony is that earlier this decade, Bill Gates promised to make Microsoft software, and Windows in particular, much more secure. And now that Microsoft may have achieved that (and the jury is still out on that), the company is already looking to turn a buck on it?

There's something wrong with a company that totes up the worst-ever software security record, then decides to make security a top priority, and then decides to withhold that security from any user that it deems hasn't properly paid -- even when the lack of validation is most often caused by the sellers users bought their computers from or the repair shops they brought their PCs to. Even when Microsoft's validation process is correct, which it probably is most of the time, it's my assessment that the vast majority of the Windows Vista users were victimized by others. And now Microsoft will be making them pay, first by reducing their security, then by reducing the functionality of Vista.

Hello! Is anyone in Redmond actually paying attention to what it's doing? Do they have any self awareness at all? Because I'm beginning to think that a lot of people are going to take a pass on Vista.

Microsoft is drunk on its own Kool-Aid. It has become this era's Gi-normous ACME Corporation, like Standard Oil and AT&T before it. It has completely lost touch with its beginnings. Because there was a time that Microsoft was David to IBM's Goliath. And Microsoft has more than once gulled the giant. But in its giant suit, Microsoft looks pathetic. Other than attempting month in, month out to deliver profits for its Wall Street masters, Microsoft lacks mission, has gotten far away from its roots and lacks any sense of innovation.

If ever Microsoft needed a course correction -- make that a total change of scenery -- it's now.

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More than five years ago Microsoft debuted its first anti-piracy measures, Windows Product Activation (WPA) and Office Product Activation (OPA). Now the company is rolling out Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) and Office Genuine Advantage (OGA). No matter how many acronyms ending in A Microsoft delivers, they still come down to one thing: Finding new ways to increase revenues for Microsoft's quarterly reports.

Far be it from me to look askance at any company trying to increase revenues. I do my level best to help my company increase revenues every day. But the attempt to market WGA and OGA as any sort of advantage to Windows buyers is repugnant. Microsoft claims that WGA is an "opt-in" program are absurd. Its willful disregard for even small percentages of end users who are wrongly tried and convicted -- by a judge and jury consisting of a small piece of fallible software -- as being guilty of possessing a counterfeit copy of Windows XP or Office is greedy and mean spirited. Windows Genuine Advantage is an incredibly short-sighted program.

The smartest thing Steve Jobs has done in a long time was committing to Intel's CPUs to power the Macintosh line of desktop computers. That made possible Apple's Boot Camp software, which lets you install and run Windows XP natively on Intel Macs.

The furor Boot Camp stirred up by making it possible -- and fully sanctioned by Apple -- to install Windows XP on a Mac turned a negative PR trend (hackers installing XP on the Mac) into a positive. It also focused the spotlight on the Mac, provoking guilty, techno-lust on the part of Windows users everywhere over sleek dual-core Intel-based MacBook Pro notebooks. It won major publicity for Apple, not to mention a nice spike for Mac sales this month.