Win Activation

Yeah, Dan - you really should pick up a Mac =)

Re: the phone calls (in general, not just MS) - having worked at (and developed software for) help desks / call centers, I can tell you that no company really wants people to call. In a perfect world, they'd get no calls for support at all. Short of that, they'd like to resolve all support calls as quickly as possible, because each call costs them money.

That is why you have (in most call centers) various "tiers" or levels of support. The people who first answer the phones are paid the least, and they are usually only trained to try the common, documented solutions. Since the idea is that you document the solutions that you get the most calls on, and train these "first line" people to only deal with those, you save money by raising your first call resolution percentage. If the people being paid the least can resolve a high percentage of incoming calls, then that's a good thing.

Then you have the other levels, where you get people who are more and more experienced and knowledgeable about the product or service in question, and are actually able to diagnose and troubelshoot without reading from a script. Because of the demand for more knowledge and problem solving skills, these workers make more money. Consequently, you want as few calls passed up to higher levels as you can, because the call gets more expensive the higher it goes.

The big problem with this approach is that they try to cut down on expenses too much at level one, so they skimp on developing systems, training, and other up front expenses that would improve the quality of their first response level.

Sounds horrible, I hate calling MS and dealing with them in any way.
MS has an argance or something, like you have to be some sort of
IT expert to use their crap or talk to them.
My experience has been as frustrating as above with microsoft.

So many companies have a help line that they act like they don't really want people to actually
call on.

http://www.gethuman.com/us/ has a shortcut cheat list to get thru the phone
trees.

I did call Apple for my daughter's mac book and got thru easily.
She did pay extra for this service. It was nice to be
able to talk to an English as first language speaker.

One solution for you. Pick up a Mac. Now after the groans of 'oh there's another mac zealot' are done with. If you can pick one up, i'd highly recommend it. Vista is a good year away from working out user issues, including licensing. But as i remember, Windows XP had the same types of issues when launched. Now XP is fairly decent... Personally, i will wait to see how Microsoft changes its strangle-hold on its users before i invest time in installing it.

Maybe it was the "A as in APPLE" that threw them off... =)

I'd be interested to find out how that process works behind the scenes; in other words what are they doing while they're making you wait. Because, in the end, it probably SHOULD be very difficult for you to get a second product key, because it if weren't the system would be more easy to abuse.

I'd say they should focus on cleaning up their primary process so that it doesn't happen again, but that would probably require a lot more work on their side too, so it's a balancing act.

IMHO, this will always be an issue with products that require registration but also want to be "easy" for the "average user" to install. Such as system will probably always perform poorly on one side of that equation; it will either be easy to pirate or occasionally more challenging for legit users.

Yet another argument for free software...

Let's just say that I tried to activate a valid product that I purchased from a retailer (Amazon) and it didn't work, I don't have it on any other computer and their own secondary activation didn't work. It was absolutely horrible and the worst experience on the phone I've ever had.

They kept telling me "no problem, we can help you" and "this happens all the time" but if either was true it wouldn't have taken so long. And trying to read 30 characters to someone that speaks English as their second language is agonizing, at one point I had to read that string 6 times with constant corrections. "No, I said A as in APPLE" or "No, it's an E as in EDWARD".

It's just all BS to me. I know Windows needs it while Apple doesn't because Apple sells hardware but their customer service shouldn't have been so terrible. If it "happens all the time" why waste 2 hours and I had an assigned tech on the line with me for 1.5 hours of it.

I wonder when it becomes a loss for them when they have a customer on the phone that long using up their support resources for a "simple" case.

They just ended up giving me another product key which they told me 15 minutes in, 30 minutes in and every ten minutes there-after that they could not give do.

What was the problem with the normal activation process?