Those pirates. What are they up to now? Apparently, they are damaging Vista sales. That's right, or at least that's right according to Steve Ballmer. Following up on last week's decline in Microsoft shares and Ballmer talking about "overly-optimistic" sales predictions, he went on to cite piracy in China, India, Brazil and Russia as key sources of revenue lost, as well as other "emerging" markets. Could that really be truth, not even three weeks past the release? Cracked versions of Vista aren't exactly falling from the sky. Regardless, he also proposed a solution to the problem that would increase revenue - toughening WGA:

Ballmer believes that one way Microsoft can bump up Windows sales is to tighten the screws on pirates. "Piracy reduction can be a source of Windows revenue growth, and I think we'll make some piracy improvements this year."
Would making WGA more restrictive than it already is do anything to improve sales? It seems far fetched in the least and simply ridiculous at the worst. A pirate isn't phased by lack of updates to begin with. The only steps I can see them taking now is making a system disable itself if it attempts to update. If that happened, odds are it'd be cracked. Wishful thinking for sure.