Microsoft: Piracy Makes China An Irrelevant Market
In August Microsoft rolled out a new anti-piracy program called "Windows Genuine Advantage." Critics in China call it the "Black Screen of Death": The desktops on pirated versions of Windows turn all black, and no matter what a user does, they'll revert to all-black every hour until Windows is validated.
Angry Chinese Windows users, long accustomed to not paying for software, are up in arms and accusing Microsoft of "hacking" and violating Chinese criminal law. Chinese government officials have told official state news agency Xinhua the black-out policy remains "open to question."
Meanwhile, Microsoft is responding by stating the truth about China: Software piracy is so bad the country is irrelevant as a market anyway:
"China's not really very important to our business right now," Steve said in Australia last week. "I'd like it to be but it's not because of the high rate of piracy of intellectual property. We need some IP reform in China for it to be important to our financial results."
Will China force Microsoft to back down from its black-out policy, and have Steve continue to call the country an irrelevant market and a den of thieves at every opportunity? Possible, but we think not.
2ndly, it is microsoft who set the price unrealistically, they are asking exact same price(oh, even more expensive) do you expect poor chinese people could afford to pay the same price
as us? they are earning 5~10% money as us yet their food,housing,transportation and others are way more expensive than us. the only thing cheaper than us is the human labor. microsoft should adjust its price to 10% of us' price, i think then, most ppl in china would not do the piracy.
Sure, the hackers will simply issue a patch, but i thikn Micorsoft will likely come back with more mods to keep the problem front and center.
Even if this type of action encourages China to go it alone with its own OS or with open source, it will takes years if not decades for that effort to make any real impact. people and businesses, even the chinese, simply will not switch from Microsoft because the swithching costs are soo high. much easier to make some effort to pay Microsoft at least something.
so i say, good for you MSFT, although i am curious why you chose now.
Still its funny how Steve Ballmer made an amazing comment months back, saying that piracy its the cause for low Vista sales! (He was not referring only to China). Yeah right Steve! Gimme more MS Kool-Aid please.
Also get this, if you have to have piracy and Linux, MS its not really that mad about piracy as long as it affects Linux expansion -big ouch! Even if no one will confess this inside MS offices.
I guess Chinese folks enjoy Vista-free way better than Vista-payed and finally it looks like there will be no Mojave experiment in Beijing any time soon, me thinks.
Dear Microsoft, VISTA rocks and its pretty... when it works. Please don't do this again to us.
Kindly a user
Sadly, piracy rates are like 80% in both China & India.
Tsk. Tsk.
hey msftsucks, they DID divide the price by large factor already. XP Student Edition for China, 199Y = 30USD
Come on, fork over a relative pittance for the enabler of your daily routine, bitchin at foreign devils on a Windows machine.
While I feel for MSFT shareholders and agree that China should step up enforcement, MSFT is not doing themselves any favors by:
1. Dismissing China's potential
2. Deploying surreptitious installs
3. Charging about 5% of the average worker's annual income for the software.
What they will succeed in doing is driving millions of people in the world's fastest growing economy to linux / google docs. A more constructive approach might be to continually ad new features after a version has shipped making them available for download only to people who have validated copies.