Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) is pretty consistent in one area these days: shipping consumer and business operating system software that is increasingly locked down for fear of rampant software piracy. Anyone who has owned a recent or current Microsoft operating system probably knows that to download updates, bug fixes and other goodies on a regular basis, your PC must "phone home" to Microsoft and report that it contains a legit operating system. What happens when the "home" portion of that sentence is malfunctioning?

Almost a month ago, Microsoft's servers that validate genuine installations of its newest Windows Vista operating system went down -- and many PCs around the globe could not get updates from the software giant due to its server problems, even though they in fact did have legitimate software installations. So this is it, huh? Our entire computing environment can melt down because Microsoft's servers can't say everything is OK? From a customer standpoint, this kind of piracy protection is rather appalling.

This one incident has exploded into the techno-blogging scene recently, and Microsoft's "Windows Genuine Advantage" (WGA) piracy protection strategy is currently blowing up in its face from the viewpoint of many industry pundits. Yes, every server has problems from time to time and mistakes happen -- but when that result starts telling Microsoft customers that they have a "fake" version of Windows Vista installed on their machines, that can the potential to turn into a huge black eye for the company. In this case, it did. One point of failure led to a huge problem for 19 hours, and any good designer will have multiple redundancies in place to prevent this sort of thing. What didn't the world's largest software maker have one?

(Disclosure: I own MSFT shares as of 9-14-07)