They forced an externality on to the rest of us.

The marginal cost of sending updates to pirated machines is probably negligible, and pirates adapted to WGA within a couple weeks.

So – they managed to convert a few Western users who didn't know they were running a pirated copy. I would place a good bet that the total volume of pirated licenses remained the same, though.

More recent experiments have shown that piracy is really more about customer service than straight up cost [0]. As a result, we have large hordes of unpatched machines that are easy to convert into zombies and running outdated software the rest of us have to support.

[0] http://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economic...

>running outdated software the rest of us have to support.

Do we really, though? If the boxes running IE6 are in Asia and elsewhere in the developing world, how many of us really need to develop for them? I can't think of many websites that need to cater to Chinese pirates.

> running outdated software the rest of us have to support.

Why would you support outdated software only used by pirates? Just don't support it to force the pirates to update.

I am from a developing country (Bangladesh) and use a pirated version of Windows (because you cannot buy the genuine one at stores). If I wasn't a web developer I would probably be using Windows XP and IE6 (easier to crack).

I regularly pay for stuff on the internet (domains, hosting, invoicing apps, ios apps, etc. etc.) as long as Paypal is supported (we cannot use credit cards to make international payments).

You need to support as many people as possible with your webapp, you never know who your customer is.

Just because they knowingly or not pirated a copy of Windows does not mean they won't pay for your web app, if at least not in the form of eyeballs for your ads.

That seems like a fair criticism. Those pirated copies of XP will now never be updated again. This will both contribute to the persistence of IE 6 as well as allow security flaws in XP and IE 6 to go unpatched which will increase the potential for these machines to become part of a bot not or spread viruses. At the same time Microsoft's actions didn't prevent any of these pirated copies from continuing to be used, so the overall outcome is a net negative for everyone.

Then they'll get viruses and have to reformat, or call Microsoft support and find out that it's pirated (if they didn't already know) and eventually end up upgrading. If nothing else, the fact that hardware vendors no longer make Windows XP drivers is about to kill off IE 6 once and for all anyway.