

The Windows ecosystem reboot is bad news if you plan to move country - owenw
http://owened.co.nz/how-microsoft-might-sink-its-own-ecosystem

======
veidr
This is a real problem for 'internationally oriented' people. I don't do
MS/Xbox, so cannot speak to that, but I do Android/Google, iOS/Apple, and
Kindle/Amazon.

I have been living multinationally for the past several years and it is a
serious hindrance on all three of these 'ecosystems'.

Apple seems the easiest to work with as long as you maintain an account and a
credit card in every country you want to deal with. Their devices all support
multiple accounts, albeit with significant inconvenience, and they do not
disable features based on your geographical location.

Amazon is not as good, but I only use them for Kindle so it doesn't faze me as
much and I just deal with having a US account.

Google is the worst of these three in my experience, because their digital
restrictions and feature-disabling systems are mainly based on physical
geographic location (which they sometimes get wrong), not the location of the
linked credit card. This means, for instance, that I can buy a Google phone in
San Francisco and not even be able to look up my order the next week when I am
back in Tokyo. (The product isn't available here so you can't even _see_ it--
even in the purchase history section when logged into the account.)

All of these systems are horribly flawed from the multinational customer's
perspective. But essentially, big corporate doesn't really give two shits
about the minute percentage of users that live/work in more than one country,
so I doubt this problem will get better.

In fact, I expect it to get worse as more companies copy Apple's platform-as-
closed-monoculture concept (as e.g. Microsoft is doing).

~~~
josteink
_I don't do MS/Xbox, so cannot speak to that, but I do Android/Google,
iOS/Apple, and Kindle/Amazon._

I got a Kindle as a birthday gift from my better half. In advance, I had told
family members that I was getting a Kindle one way or the other, so I asked
them to please don't buy me physical books. "Please give me giftcards for
Amazon instead".

Fair enough. So said. So they did. And that was when I was in for a surprise.

You cannot get a UK-model Kindle outside the UK, so my better half had ordered
a US-model.

Normally, when buying from Amazon, I have always in the past ordered books
from amazon.co.uk, because they are geographically closer to me here in Europe
and it just feels more natural. And seemingly so had a few of the giftcard-
buyers thought as well.

Imagine my surprise when I find out I cannot redeem my UK giftcard-code in the
US-store and that I cannot order Kindle-books for my US-kindle in the UK-store
where I was forced to redeem my code.

In the end I had to buy physical books after all.

Granted: Amazon is by far one of the better players in the field. But because
of that, this leaking out of internal business processes onto me, their
customer, took me by great surprise.

I had honestly expected better from them.

~~~
Gmo
I think you can switch the country of your kindle ... but I seem to recall you
can do it only once (or you lose all your previous books).

~~~
ngoede
Nah you can do it as many times as you want and the books are in the same
listing on your kindle regardless. You have to switch your "account" while
actually buying the books.

------
praptak
_"They will only cause the lower classes to move about needlessly"_ \-- The
Duke of Wellington, on early steam railroads.

This is how the content industry perceives us. We are viewed as peasants tied
to the land, sheep contained within fencing. We are supposed to stay where we
are so that we can be sheared effectively.

~~~
dasil003
I'll grant your overzealous hyperbole just on the strength of finding that
quote.

------
zainny
This also impacts you as a developer in the Microsoft ecosystem. I signed up
for a Windows Phone developer account and released several WP7 applications
while living in Canada. I just recently moved back home to Australia and on
trying to update my contact details, payment information, etc. found that
everything is locked to Canada (and, subsequently, bank/credit accounts that
are now closed).

Words can not express how poorly I think of Microsoft at this point.

------
Vivtek
It's a problem for Nintendo, believe it or not. My 13-year-old son saved up to
buy a game now that we've relocated to Hungary - the chip wouldn't even load
on his American 3DS. Insane. Fortunately he got store credit, but ... why in
the world?

~~~
w1ntermute
Yet another win for piracy. It's amusing to hear people complain about all
these things. It doesn't matter what country I'm in, my private torrent site
functions without any problems.

~~~
fakeer
Though it's not connected to the comment you commented upon but I recently
tried buying some music at one of my country's leading online stores
(Flipkart) and the MP3s (no choice of other formats) were of poor quality and
without any ID3 tags or so. After almost a week's <me-customer support-me>
game, I gave up and acquired the songs from TPB (or IPT maybe). This time
there was no guilt :-)

------
dendory
Honestly it's nothing new and will only get worse. That's why I'm always very
skeptical of cloud systems, inter linking of accounts, and having so much of
your digital life under one company's roof. What if you want to move country?
What if you upload a piece of data innocently that is deemed to breach ToS?
What if the company simply bans your account without telling you why? What if
they close down? There are a million reason, which is why we need more small,
decentralized solutions, and less services that try to integrate everything
under the sun like Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook have been doing.

------
rmc
I presume the poster could use EU data protection / privacy law here?
Companies are legally required to keep personal data accurately, and if you
tell them that the data they hold on you is incorrect, they are required to
correct it.

A simple formal letter / email to them saying "My address / country of
residence is X" should be all that's legally required. You may need to contact
your local Data Protection / Information Commissioner to get them to enforce
it.

If their systems can't handle it, then storing personal data in that system is
illegal. :)

------
willthames
Also a problem for the Apple App Store - I recently moved countries and all
the apps I'd paid for (including OS X Lion) were no longer available to
download until I switched back my details to the old country.

~~~
tomflack
And Android (to a lesser extent). While I was in China, I was blocked from
buying any apps as paid apps aren't available there. Even dialing a VPN wasn't
enough - the phone knew where it was.

With the amount of stuff(TM) that we buy digitally now, this is becoming a
huge problem.

~~~
kalleboo
Android goes off the country of the SIM card that's in it, last I checked. So
either you can pop in a foreign SIM and make your purchase over WiFi (this
worked for me even with an expired SIM), or use an app such as MarketEnabler
to spoof your SIM carrier code.

~~~
shinratdr
What about Android devices without 3G? Like all WiFi only Android tablets or
Galaxy S players?

------
RyanMcGreal
Wait, SkyDrive is regionally locked? Isn't portability and universal
accessibility the main purpose of cloud storage?

~~~
sp332
I thought it was odd that the article claimed that you can't export data from
SkyDrive. It's dead simple to "export" since the data is synced to your
computer anyway!

~~~
RyanMcGreal
What if your computer dies? Is there an easy way to get the data back? What if
your computer dies and you've moved to another country? (These are honest
questions - I'm not asking rhetorically.)

~~~
sp332
The main feature of skydrive is dropbox-ish cloud storage that syncs a folder
on your computer with their online storage. To "recover" you can just log in
to a web browser and download the files.

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
Which is the expected solution, assuming Microsoft doesn't try to prevent you
from doing so as a result of your location.

~~~
sp332
I guess the "expected solution" would be that you can install the desktop
client on a new computer, log in to your account and start syncing from
anywhere in the world.

------
csense
I've always been amazed at how crappy various forms of region locking are --
DVD's and game consoles come to mind.

It's not necessarily bad news for the company: Making your customers purchase
the same product multiple times sounds like a great business model, if you can
get consumers to accept it. Which people generally do, unfortunately.

------
acabal
To some extent this is a problem with Diablo 3 and Battle.net in general too.
If you (like I did) travel to Europe, download/play D3 on the EU servers, then
come back home to the US, you'll find that your character is forever trapped
in the Europe zone, and you'll have to start a new one in the US zone if you
want to play with < 1000ms ping.

I have no idea why companies still region lock things when almost the entire
point of the internet was to be a global network.

~~~
mguillemot
To be fair with Blizzard, they DO allow you to create characters in any of the
3 zones (Europe/America/Asia) with any valid account, which is an improvement
over their previous games. But true, you'd better give some thoughts about
which one you really want to use _before_ starting the game. Which is a shame
when half of your friends are playing in Europe, the other in Americas, and
you yourself live in Japan.

Being in the field of online games and payments, I think the main reason they
don't allow you to transfer characters between zones is the Real Money Auction
House (for legal reasons and not to allow inter-zone speculation).

~~~
Dylan16807
For Diablo they do. For starcraft if you want to play with someone on a
different continent... well it's supposedly coming soon. I mean the game's
only been out for over two years, can't expect them to have the multiplayer
working.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Sounds like something the EU may want to deal with, considering their freedom
of movement.

~~~
kalleboo
I remember reading that Apple was preparing to merge all the iTunes stores in
the Eurozone into a master EU store after pressure from the EU, but I don't
know if that was just rumors or it's still in progress.

------
manojlds
I was bitten by this. Hailing from India and living in Canada, having bought a
new Xbox that came with a game download, I was not able to download it because
the game was not allowed in my region. I had to create a new account for it

------
underwater
I've been bitten by this too. I like my Windows Phone, but having to do a
factory reset to a new account when moving to a new country was infuriating.

I don't see why individual purchases can't be linked to a region (and region
specific credit card) rather than the entire account.

------
ekianjo
People who travel and change location once in a while have been learning for a
long time, like me, that having an open system is the best bet to avoid
trouble. If you use anything else, you never know in what situation you will
be in sooner or later.

~~~
yardie
I travel and really, Apple seems to be the least encumbered. The only thing
they need is a valid credit card for the store of the country (I believe this
partially functions to verify you exist and serves as an age check). I did
that then deleted it, and loaded about $100 worth of giftcards into the
account.

Unlike my Google music experience, iTunes Match works. Using DNS forwarding
Netflix works.

~~~
vacri
_apt-get install -foo-_ doesn't care at all what country you're calling it
from. You don't even need an account on the 'store', let alone a credit card.

~~~
ekianjo
Yeah, that is what I meant by "open" systems. GNU/Linux distro. Once you taste
freedom you do not go back.

------
mxfh
Well it gets even better, if you ever dare to try to update your Windows Phone
with Zune, your host Windows locale has to be the same as the country you set
up your Windows Live ID with.

Godspeed you 21st century travelling multilingual expat.

<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2452829>

[http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/zune/forum/account-
phone/...](http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/zune/forum/account-phone/the-
location-setting-for-your-windows-live-
id/5fc29ee2-413c-4652-91a1-2c5cbbf46a57?msgId=9e1c2ffd-4ecf-4866-bf3b-ddb2afe80018)

------
radicalbyte
Sorry, this cannot be right. I've had an Xbox and an Xbox Live account linked
to my MSN since 2001.

In 2006 I moved from the UK to The Netherlands, in the opposite direction of
the guy in the blog post.

I've never had a problem buying anything on Xbox Live: the only issue I've had
is the same as with all networks: they always give me the terms + conditions
in Dutch with no option to switch to English (which was only an issue for the
first 18 months, after that time my Dutch was good enough to read it).

~~~
pyre
Then tell me how to change the region on your XBox Live account so that it
will allow you to enter a credit card for a different country (the address
section is tied to the region).

------
sunkencity
"ecosystem" in regards to computer software has got to be one of the worst
analogies. It invokes all sort of mushy animistic preconceived notions from
way back when, like the concept of divine harmony. I much preferred when
people talked about software running on the Windows platform, or the mac
platform, rather than propping them up with some sort of life-spirit.

------
diggan
I had the same problem with Google Play on my Android device. I moved to Spain
and now I can only buy spanish books which is a little too early for me right
now.

There isn't even a setting for which language you want your content in. That
would be a first step.

So as said, it isn't just Windows who got a problem with moving across
borders.

------
forgottenpaswrd
Sounds curious for me because I don't play games that much, but it must be the
10th person that talks to me about this "problem" that their xbox
"achievements" are lost like is some kind of tragedy.

It means a lot for them, I can't really understand that.

------
junto
Apple, PayPal and a vast array of other global brands have no support for
someone moving to a different country.

I mean, who would voluntarily want to leave the US? It's unthinkable.

Edge case, get used to it. Don't live the dream....

------
malsme
Simple answer: don't rely on "cloud" services. There's often a good reason for
these restrictions, such as copyright and IP limitations. If you want to own
something, then actually own it.

------
Shorel
This is good news for Steam.

------
josscrowcroft
I get this, and why it's frustrating - but I'm still gonna call First World
Problems on it.

~~~
da_n
I am really starting to dislike this meme. Yeah, this is not something the UN
needs to weigh in on, I get that. You have managed to both state the obvious
and betray patronising superiority. Congratulations. Do you go around
dismissing lots of opinions all day with that quip simply because they are not
opinions about how to source water in arid territories, or how to keep goats
healthy?

~~~
josscrowcroft
Yes.

------
Toshio
See, microsoft lives in a bubble world nobody has disrupted until very
recently. To microsoft, the end-users and the customers are two very different
groups of people. The customer (and decision maker) is the purchasing manager
at xyz large corporation, the person whom microsoft goes out of their way to
wine and dine and schmooze. The end-user is the employee who is forced to work
with sub-par technology. The end-user has to suck it up or be shown the door.

Apparently some genius at microsoft has decided that this tried-and-true
approach from the business world is also the secret key to winning consumers'
hearts and minds.

