In what amounts to a pretty big 180 degree turnaround for Microsoft, the company has announced that it is getting rid of the Reduced Functionality Mode it built into Vista. Reduced Functionality Mode is what happens if Vista thinks it isn’t a “Genuine” (read : doesn’t have a valid registration code) copy of itself running on someone’s computer system. Basically what happens in this mode is this, from Microsoft’s own white paper on the subject : “The default Web browser will be started and the user will be presented with an option to purchase a new product key. There is no start menu, no desktop icons, and the desktop background is changed to black. [...] After one hour, the system will log the user out without warning“. All very well and good, but the problem with that function was two-fold:

1) Microsoft is treating every one of its customers as potential thieves. See the reactions from consumers on MSDN’s own blogs.

2) Most importantly, a lot of users of Vista (and XP) who were using “Genuine” copies of it found themselves facing a computer which was either in Reduced Functionality Mode in the case of Vista, or Windows Genuine Advantage was flagging their XP installations as being invalid.

Microsoft has faced a lot of criticism from many different directions because of this. So what they’ve announced now is that with the upcoming Service Pack 1 for Vista (due sometime in the first quarter of 2008), they’re going to remove Reduced Functionality Mode altogether, replacing it with “nag screens” which will, apparently, constantly let a user know if Vista thinks the copy running on a computer isn’t “Genuine”.

End of story? Well, not really, in my opinion. Microsoft are trying to spin this as a “change of tactics” in its war against piracy of its operating systems. From a report on the subject on the BBC News web site;

It said efforts to tackle piracy had seen numbers of fake copies of Vista at half the level of XP, the previous Windows operating system.

This says to me personally something other than the first impression you would gain (that levels of Vista piracy are half that of XP because of the anti-piracy measures in Vista). It says to me that Microsoft, seeing slower than expected uptake of Vista, is beginning to worry. And it’s beginning to worry an awful lot, and what better way to increase the number of copies of Vista running on a PC than to make it “less hostile” to piracy?

You may think what I’m saying is counter-intuitive - what benefit is there for Microsoft if there are tens of thousands or more of non-paid-for copies of Vista running on PC’s? You’re thinking in the short-term. There is a long-term benefit for Microsoft in that the more generations of people who grow up seeing only Microsoft software running on computers, the more Microsoft gets ingrained into people’s heads that “computing = Microsoft”.

So, I say Microsoft, in removing Reduced Functionality Mode from Vista, have suddenly realised that they’ve gone too far and that they’re getting desperate to see Vista succeed - that they’ve realised that they’ve made a big error in their long-term game plan, and they’re now making moves to correct that error. Whether or not this will succeed is another question, though. Apparently the upcoming Service Pack 3 for Windows XP speeds up XP such that the people testing beta versions of SP3 say that XP seems to be faster than Vista. Coupled with that is that people genuinely (heh) seem to be quite happy to stick with XP, as Vista introduces problems when running a lot of older software. And not to forget that Linux also appears to making good headway into the desktop too.

Microsoft getting desperate? In my opinion it is.