It's undeniable, in my experience, that the tool did help, despite all the swearing to the contrary. Making a leap from there to believing that it probably made it too easy to clone Windows machines in a way that Microsoft had no control on, and hence asked him to pull it, doesn't seem so crazy though.
Microsoft doesn’t care if you clone systems, (why would they?) they care about the volume of help desk tickets created by doing it wrong.
And a lot that are not helpful, iirc. It was probably 10 years ago when I had to deal with this, but my recollection is that Sysprep was messing with a lot of stuff - more than I needed.
> Microsoft doesn’t care if you clone systems, (why would they?)
Lol, licenses, of course. Nowadays they got a bit softer on the issue, but back then they were still very very twitchy about duplicating and virtualizing systems.
Huh? I’ll grant you that Microsoft was picky about being paid for their software, but they produced a ton of tools to support cloning and duplicating. License compliance was handled with audits and CALs, not some weird cabal of anti-imaging.