[marmee]

I always thought that when revenues are too high these companies need to raise expenses so they could have places to trim for rough quarters up ahead. Therefore the hiring strategy in 2020 was sound.

I've also seen the reverse, Netflix not curbing on shared accounts and Microsoft having really limited anti piracy tooling early on, allowing them to keep revenue reserves for the future

[themitigating]

I thought the lack of anti piracy for Windows and Abode products was a way of getting people into the ecosystem which helps later. Not sure if this was ever confirmed

[hangonhn]

Yeah at one of my old jobs in IT, Microsoft would perform software license audits just after a new release of Office. They would find that we were in deficit and then force us to buy licenses but the only licenses we could buy were the new versions of Office. Of course then we would have to upgrade all the other ones that had the licenses. This happens every few years. Obviously it was our fault for not doing better license allocation but I feel like Microsoft knew this is common and took advantage of it.

[WalterBright]

Back in the Zortech days, we didn't install any copy protection mechanism for just this reason. (Also, copy protection annoys people, and annoying our customers was not something we wished to do.)

That also meant we had no idea how many copies were pirated.

[granshaw]

I've had a similar overall thought – as a CEO/CFO seems that you'd want a relatively in-line growth/margin/whatever target each quarter, and so if you get a windfall you'd be incentivized to somehow spread that out or create slack for yourself in future quarters instead of milking it for all it's worth.

Very weird, but that's what the current public capital markets incentivize...

[lockhouse]

Microsoft still doesn’t really care that much about piracy for some products. You can run Windows 11 Pro with 99% of the features in tact without activating it.

[HDThoreaun]

Yea microsoft mostly cares about the enterprise market now. They prefer people pirating windows over using other operating systems because it ensures their enterprise productivity software monopoly.

[bobsmooth]

I just installed Windows 10 on a laptop using the official USB creation tool. You just gotta leave it disconnected from the internet and you can make a local account with no restrictions.

[marmee]

Haven't used windows 11, but there were times when 999999999 was a valid cdkey and there were times when you had to activate the OS with Microsoft servers

[bombcar]

Microsoft is WAY more concerned with companies selling PCs with illegitimate copies of windows than it is with people having illegitimate copies.

So as long as Windows 11 shows "HACKED BY GONZO, TOTALLY NOT LEGIT" they're fine with it.