As far as I can tell, some guy bought a copy of VMWare Fusion with a moderately poor customer experience, can't activate it within the first half hour, writes a blog post to complain and gets his buddies at Fog Creek to upvote.
Why on earth did you think other people would be interested in this?
It's this kind of crap that drives people to piracy (with justification).
When VMWare moves to a simpler (perhaps iTunes-like) system, then pirates have no rational justification.
I get that you should make it easy for people to buy your software legitimately. But I don't buy the argument that if you don't, they are "justified" in stealing it. Everybody rationalizes whatever they do. That doesn't make it right.
> Why on earth did you think other people would be interested in this?
Well, right now it's top on HN. Seems pretty self-explanatory.
There are an infinite number of ways to communicate how not to do things. Enumerating them only serves to decrease the entropy rate.
What I suspect is most people enjoyed this article because VMware made a fool of themselves, but not, as you suggest, because it provides an enlightening anecdote that will inspire the reader to avoid a common pitfall and yield an effective checkout process.
Someone once said to me "A smart person learns from their mistakes, a brilliant person learns from other people's mistakes."
Positive examples show you what you should do and how you should do it, but they often leave out why. A negative example makes it very clear why you should do things a certain way and avoid doing them other ways.