IE7 and WMP11 Betas
Our team has been working recently with a couple of internal teams to work genuine Windows validation into their setup. Both Internet Explorer 7 Beta and the Windows Media Player 11 Beta have validation built in. There’s a shot of the IE 7 Beta setup validation screen at the below.
I think building in validation checking into product releases like IE7 is good. Microsoft spends significant resources developing ‘out of band’ releases such as new versions of IE, Windows Media Player and products like Microsoft Antispyware/ Windows Defender and Microsoft Photo Story 3 and these products should be available for customers who actually paid for the software they are using.
Some might think this approach feels more like a take-away than a value-add because the previous versions were ‘free’. I don’t find this totally convincing because the previous versions of these products were meant our customers just as much we just weren’t as sophisticated about verifying this. In fact since these kinds of apps are written for Windows it makes sense that the company would expect that the copy of Windows these products would be used on had been paid for. I think this strategy is likely to be adopted by other products for Windows that are released on their own.
