Buy & keep

Just saw this phrase on an advert for Sky.
So you buy something and they let you keep it. Isn’t that the idea of buying something? Otherwise it’s renting isn’t it?
Words fail me.

Can’t wait for Sky to be bought be Fox. It will be like Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins having a baby. Or something.

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Try explaining the concept to Microsoft. I bought Windows 10 recently. But they seem to think they can take it back when it suits them and bugger about with it. I guess once you become as powerful as Bill Gates it’s just a small step to the belief that actually you own everything and should be allowed to screw around with other people’s stuff because, let’s face it, you are both smarter and more important than they are, and whatever trouble and/or nuisance your tinkering causes them doesn’t matter. Because they are just little people.

VB

Software licensing has been like that for a long time, though. Nobody can be bothered to read the legalese, and who can blame them?

Plus Bill Gates has had fuck all to do with the running of Microsoft for a long time and only owns about 2% of the shares.

His business ethos remains though

With Microsoft, you effectively buy the right to use Windows for an unspecified time, you never actually ‘own’ a copy of it.

In a few areas vendors’ attempts to impose contractual conditions on purchasers have been recognised as simply wrong (in the sense of ‘bad’ rather than ‘erroneous’). Vendors persisted in attempting to screw their customers over for long enough that eventually parliament had a sense of humour failure and banned those practices in law Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 - Wikipedia.

If it was down to me then I’d do this kind of thing more often. Instead of telling customers “If you don’t like the way software is sold then just don’t buy it” I’d be telling vendors “If you can’t write software which is robust enough not to require constant sticking-plaster repairs and which does the things that customers need, not the things that you want them to ‘need’, then you’re not really fit to be selling things to people”.

It does seem to be the coming thing though. One of these mornings I fear I’m going to walk out of my front door and find that Ford have taken my car away without warning because they just fancied servicing it.

VB

I’ve seen your Ford, even Ford aren’t that fucking brave! :slight_smile:

It’s brown ! What’s not to like ?

VB

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