If you've been selling a product for more than 10 years and you've shipped hundreds of millions of units, you’d think your customers would know what they're buying. For Microsoft, that's not the case.

The culprit is the hopelessly confusing, practically Byzantine Windows licensing structure, which consists of a maze of terms and conditions that define (and ultimately restrict) what you can do with Microsoft Windows in your home or business. Worse still, the license terms are only partially aligned with the activation and validation tools that are supposed to ensure that your copy of Windows is “genuine.� If you fill a room with 10 PCs, each running an apparently identical version of Windows, there’s no easy way to tell what kind of license restrictions apply to each one - or, indeed, whether any or all of those PCs are properly licensed.

The result? Mass confusion. The most damning piece of evidence is a document prepared by Microsoft for its partners in the distribution channel, which contains this remarkable admission.

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Microsoft, Windows, Prodcusts, Licensing, Volume License