![]() Wait maybe there's a subscription, somewhere. OK maybe just forget this and buy a new copy of Quickbooks Desktop for Mac. No acknowledgement, maybe it'll call tomorrow or something. Ok now it lets you give a phone #, and says they'll call you? Two hours later, nothing. You can click the button all you want, does nothing. After wading through tree they say to click the button to contact support, or sign in. ![]() Then close reload and now it gives 0x803fa067, but same thing. On the Windows side it just gave a cryptic 0xC004F213, so click "Troubleshooting" and it does nothing except "invalid buy a new copy, or contact support". Then onwards to activation to save us from those evil pirates who have zero of these problems ever. To start I had to figure out how to even quit Edge which had zero clear way to close it and none of the old alt-F4 or whatever I remembered worked. Fire it up, and whoops, Activation Error! Absolutely everything about this entire process with all 3 companies involved is total shit. I have a valid W11 Pro key, everything installed and activated fine back then. ![]() I literally, at this instant, switched over to HN to kill time waiting for stuff to slowly download after merely trying to open up a Windows 11 VM under Parallels I made a few months ago for a friend to let them run an old copy of QuickBooks for Windows on his Mac. Well, this is terrifyingly/depressingly presently relevant :(. The bigger the user numbers, the more money you can get, and when Windows activation can be done by typing some commands on a vanilla system, it is effectively “free” for everyone who wants to take it. Moreover, the leaders today don't profit from software, they profit from data collection and control over their “free” services. As a wrapper to run browser and multimedia player, Linux was ready for desktop long ago - see famous anti-Linux stunts at Microsoft. (On the other hand, it makes it hard for hardware makers to offer anything else, and for businesses to switch or elude.) A regular user doesn't care about the OS anyway, and would follow any shepherd. That's why Microsoft is careful to not make it too hard to acquire a copy of Windows. When you use Windows, you don't use the alternatives, don't consider the alternatives, and don't change your habits, which makes one even more inclined to stick to Windows. Piracy has been a promotional channel for Windows for a long time. This requires that the system is functional without activation, so that you can get online to verify the digital licence. Windows 10 and 11 have also emphasised the digital licence model - installing without a product key. With Windows 10 and 11 being free upgrades for a huge range of consumers, they know that most people have a licence anyway. The only justification I can see is that it does provide a better user experience if there's an activation problem. There is no time limit for this, unlike some of the free virtual machine images Microsoft provides for web dev testing purposes. Some personalisation features are disabled and you will have a watermark on the desktop, but other than that it's pretty normal. Later versions of Windows (including Windows 10 and Windows 11) are more or less fully functional without activation (or even inputting a product key). Windows Vista and Windows 7 loosened things - allowing you to log in and use basic functionality. That was obviously a bad UX when something has gone wrong. In Windows XP, if the system wasn't activated after the initial grace period, you couldn't log in at all. I know what you're referring to - I think other posters are confusing this with other initiatives Microsoft has like the VMs for web dev or preview releases.
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