First, it's a pain in the *ss. Especially if you're on an airplane after installing new memory in your laptop, and WinXP/OfficeXP decides you have to reactivate. That's several hours of potentially productive time down the tubes. Second, this gives M$ a big lever to force people to upgrade. Imagine this situation: You've been running Windows XP and/or Office XP for a couple years, and Microsoft just released new versions. You're perfectly happy with XP, but you want to install some system upgrades. So you buy a new hard drive and a new CPU, and maybe some more RAM, costing maybe $300. You start up your computer and get a message telling you to reactivate. You click ok, and it tells you that is is unable to reactivate, and to call Microsoft. You call Microsoft, and they tell you that the company policy is to not reactivate software if there is a newer version available. So now you also have to go out and buy new copies of Windows and Office, to the tune of an additional $500. Your $300 upgrade just became $800, you're being forced to use software you don't want or need, and most of the performance boost from the RAM and CPU has probably been negated.

It'll happen. Just you wait. Me? I'm sticking with Windows 2000 for as long as possible.