Microsoft recently announced its intention to make life easier for its Windows Server customers who're building virtualization into their infrastructures, by changing its licensing to permit an unlimited number of virtualized Windows Server instances to run on a single copy of Windows Server 2003 Data Center Edition. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced a similar change to its Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition product, allowing for four concurrent Windows Server instances.

These moves were smart because they're truly pro-customer—the less time Windows admins spend messing with their OSes, the more time they can spend messing with their apps. This is also smart because Microsoft's rivals in the server space, namely, Linux and Solaris, offer much more flexible licensing than does Windows. Microsoft's Windows Server license liberalization choices should've been a no-brainer: Microsoft simply had to do it, lest Windows Server risk losing momentum or even begin—as our Linux-Watch colleague Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols has suggested—slipping backward.

At the same time that these smart licensing moves have been bubbling up out of Redmond, Microsoft has been making some not-so-smart licensing moves. Specifically, Microsoft has announced its plans to make life tougher for its corporate Windows client customers by extending the Windows Product Activation scheme it set forth back when Windows XP first shipped to include volume license customers, who get to join one-off Windows buyers in dealing with the pirate-busting technology. Extending WPA means adding a new item of potential hassle to IT plates that are already stacked too tall dealing with all the other hassles to which Windows is heir.

What's worse, it appears that Microsoft has been expending significant development resources to make these expanded controls a reality. It seems to me that there's been a rather important and rather delayed product in the works that could've benefited from the developer hours that Microsoft had to devote to building the self-hosted activation server and associated tools required to bring WPA to Microsoft's biggest customers.

When the fairly complicated WPA scheme first reared its head in XP, I remember thinking, "How much time has Microsoft spent on this, and in what more customer-serving ways might that time have been spent?" As with all the annoyances of Windows Genuine Advantage—the Web site for which cracks me up with all its pictures of IT professionals kicking back happily, bathing in the glow of knowing that theirs is the genuine advantage—Microsoft is presenting the broadened scope of WPA somehow as a win for its customers. It's like at the supermarket near my house that introduced a new shopping cart anti-theft system, with signs that describe it as "for your convenience." I've never taken a shopping cart out of a parking lot, but I have had one of the new, my-convenience-improved carts lock up for no apparent reason on the way to my car.

New controls on Windows licensing, while targeted at unauthorized software users, can't help but cause unintentional headaches for some well-behaving customers, and Microsoft would annoy fewer of these future false-positive customers if it dropped the pretense of these programs serving any interests but those of Microsoft.

While we're on the topic of Microsoft's interests, it's worth asking whether a more aggressive WPA actually serves Microsoft. It may well be that, in the short term, Microsoft will bring in more money from companies that lack the right number of licenses. However, I think that Microsoft's tightened licensing grip for Windows clients may end up paying the biggest dividends to Microsoft's competitors. When companies take a look at the bill they'll face to get into compliance, many of those businesses are going to find a brand-new reason to look at Linux or the Mac—even Solaris, with the help of its newfound open-source community, may in time emerge as a desktop alternative.

What's more, even if it wreaks some collateral damage among well-behaving Windows shops, Microsoft's crackdown on licensing will force untold numbers of unauthorized users to start running an OS at a price they're willing to pay—even if that price is zero.

Who knows? Between the angering of legitimate users and ferreting out of illegitimate ones, WPA for all could end up being just what we need to speed our way to the sort of balanced and diverse platform landscape in which companies get to choose among suppliers—even for desktop operating systems.

Advanced Technologies Analyst Jason Brooks can be reached at jason_brooks@ziffdavis.com.