@klinux: True buddy. But you cant go around asking people at the forums here "Do you own a legal or a pirated copy? If you have a pirated copy, we wont help you" We do that for games and other software, but you cant entire shun a user's request for help, even if they're using pirated software.
But when it comes to the support we provide here, we are not cheating the company out of their profits. I posted the results of a Linux survey somewhere else in the forum (I will find and copy-paste the link here too) where it was stated that even though corporate users pay for support "options" more than 60% of them tend to use the free support available online. In fact, even a company like Microsoft would rather you do the search online rather than bug them.
In case you aren't convinced, here's an article by Monte Enbysk, Managing Editor of the Microsoft Small Business Center.
Don't make the call: Go online for tech support
Also, this might work in a country like the US where every third person pays for the software and doesn't mind shelling out over $120 on telephonic support for their products. However, I have personally called Microsoft Tech Support to resolve an issue with my activation (I had a major hardware change) and some other issues, and I was not asked to make any payment of any sort, nor was I asked for my credit card number. All I was asked for were scans of my COA and registration information. So, we at the forums aren't cheating companies out of their support, since the money they make out of end-user/SOHO support is so little that it barely covers the costs of maintaining tech support staff for covering such issues. They make their bulk by supporting corporates working on multi-installation OSes, Windows 2000 Advanced server, Exchange, SharePoint Team Portal, SQL Server Enterprise or any of the myriad enterprise applications they make. And I dont think we ever had a single case related to these at the forums, or that we helped.
@mail2and: Economic terms notwithstanding, yes, more people would buy the software legally if the companies decide to lower the prices in favor of volume sales. There are some people however, who wouldnt buy legal software if it came dirt cheap. Like someone at the forums said, he said he wouldnt pay 500 bucks for Windows, because he could get it for 50 bucks - a "rebel without a cause" attitude thats pulling the industry down. You said you're buying a Mac and will purchase upgrades because of the "utility value." But then when it comes to an end-user like myself who use my PC as an all-round solution from the mundane tasks such as browsing to playing games to coding. For me, I value functionality more than anything else, and I require an extremely high degree of application compatibility, so I chose Windows XP. I also run Linux, but I dont see myself replacing one with the other totally at least in the near future. So, I would rather not spend $115 on Mac OS X, the most safe/secure OS, and I cant look at the second most secure, OpenBSD as a replacement to my Windows box, so I choose the third most secure OS - Windows XP SP2. So what I am wondering is, you're willing to pay $115 for security because it also comes bundled along with the hardware. So, my question is, why the aversion to paying the same $115 for Windows XP, just because you have to buy it separately.
