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The Empire Strikes Back - in China
jaymzter writes: "Reuters is reporting that Microsoft is dumping $750 million into China over the next three years. According to MS CEO Steve Ballmer, "What's good for the local industry in every country is good for Microsoft", especially when that other country is actually promoting and developing home grown Linux. From the article it looks like MS is willing to overlook China's legendary software 'sharing' as long as the government stays tight with Windows."
Some would say considering China's human rights record.... that M$ and China would make a good team.
Rimshot!
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
With active promotion of Linux in China, Microsoft has to be realizing that it's better to let rampant piracy of their products continue and make some profit from those who do buy than to allow the creating of a large incubator for Linux - something that could potentially threaten their market share in countries with more enforced IP laws.
Why?
Hey Steve-O--
my friends and I pirate MS software too, give us $750,000,000 too. What's good for us is good for the net economy...
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
The Good News:
China gets an even bigger IT infrastructure.
The Bad News:
They spend most of it on hardware upgrades. Forever.
The Good News:
More technical knowledge of computers in the country.
The Bad News:
It's all directed at creating anti-Pallendrome mod chips.
The Good News:
More people in China get onto the Internet!
The Bad News:
All they can get is MSN, and only if they use Internet Explorer.
The Good News:
China gets to upgrade their military computers.
The Bad News:
The first BSOD launches WWIII.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Seems that Microsoft finally noticed that not everybody is equal and although Europe and US are already hooked on their drugs, China is still not and so they just need to back up a little, distribute for free a little while longer, before they will collect. And China is a potential market of the size of Europe and US together. So be sure they will collect eventually.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Microsoft has huge reserves, don't get me wrong, but it seems like, more and more, they are having to spend a lot of money to fend off their competition. 750 million is only a drop in the bucket, but it does add up eventually.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
...wait a second - you said Microsoft?
I'd like to see the hat that Bill Gates should be eating right now.
I'm not usually a big anti microsoft guy, but from my point of view (IE zero experience in marketing) this seems like a stupid decision. Microsoft has been spending ac rap load of money in this country to combat piracy. American piracy is nothing compared to Chinese piracy. its like comparing communism and capitalism... Oh wait it IS comparing capitalism and communism.
Yes yes i know that china has had an open door policy for a while now as far as foreign markets go and yes there are thousand of american companies making money there. The point i'm really trying to get across is that the market in china would be much different than it is here. Computers are not very prominent in most people's lives there. The biggest market i can see this in is the business market there.
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
linux open relay
or
windows open relay
were all still going to get spam from china
How lovely that an illegal monopolist is using it's ill gained cash to empower a repressive regime all in the name of extending their brand! Microsoft, the Imperial Robber Barons of the 21st century.
Power really does make strange bedfellows.
although I don't know how they'd compete with an OS by a manufacturer with "Red" in it's name..
You do. One cool movie has attributed the following saying to one of the ex-soc sector nations: As our bulgarian friends say, what cannot be bought with money can be bought with a lot of money
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I think that Mr. Ballmer means:
"What's good for Microsoft in every country is good for Microsoft."
Otherwise they wouldn't be doing this, would they?
Question is, are they actually going to provide $750MM in cash or are they going to provide software licenses? Remember that class-action settlement where they proposed to give schools licenses "worth" a certain amount of money? $750MM in non-transferable licenses doesn't really put food on peoples tables.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
The entire open source philosophy would appeal to china as it is more akin to the countries communist ideals. If china were to switch to MS products, they would be forced to bow down to american capatalism. It would also be very easy for MS to slip in a little 'extra features' that could allow the US government to spy on china more easily. If they are using linux, it would be extremely difficult to spy on them, maybe china realizes this.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
I'm interested to see what countries like china, who are pushing hard for the use of Non-MS s/w (from MS point of view), will do when MS throw money at them?
What were their original intentions?
-Open source is better we should use it
-Lets scare MS into giving us a better offer
I hope/feel China is of the first, but I wonder about others. I live in the UK where our authorities (NHS IIRC) were looking at Linux til MS gave a discount
They'll probably sink that 750 million into spam, great, here comes another unwanted email.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
Think of the it. Some day China may be taking M$ to court for monopolistic tactics. I kind of doubt anyone at M$ will be standing in front of any communist fact finding mission about poor software design or trade tactics. Here you can plead the 5th, their they can do some unsavory sort of punishment
The wages of sin are unreported and back taxes are hell to pay.
"What we all need to ask ourselves is this: is what's good for Microsoft good for the rest of us?"
I'm better off with Microsoft. Solitaire makes me look busy.
"Derp de derp."
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I pledge allegiance
To the conglomerates
of the marketing and legal departments of Microsoft
And to the domination
for which they stand
One company
Invincible
With License fees and big brother for all
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
Agreed with your points, but there are a few more things to consider:
Microsoft really is lagging in the Chinese market (200:1 copies of licensed Linux to Windows according to some estimates). This is because the only competition to pirated Windows at the moment comes from Linux.
Also, Gates at one point make a comment to Money magiazine (in 1998) where he stated that they need to get the Chinese addicted to software, so they will start paying for it. This has seriously hurt Microsoft's image in China (can you say Opium War?)
Finally, the major anti-piracy cases Microsoft has tried to bring in China have been ill-timed and seriously backfired.
So Microsoft is coming in from behind in the fight against Linux in China, and it is trying to make up for past blunders...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"So from now on no more Linux success stories on /. OK! "
Yeah!! Stories like "KDE now supports anti-aliased fonts!" has Microsoft scrambling to buy up a large market!
"Derp de derp."
That must be, oh, at least 50 cents per noggin.
In China you can probably buy a chicken or two with that.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
I get the queasies when I see any Western companies kissing the Chinese govt's butt, be them Open Source or anything else. But M$ is special:
Chinese PM: Linux secure, Windows dangelous. Fuck off.
Ballmer: But Mr. Chairman, Linux promotes freedom, while we promote tyranny! It's us who are you natural allies!!!
Chinese PM: Zounds, you're light! Let's make a deal.
Microsoft makes an annoucement that they're "investing" $750 Million somewhere, but what does that really mean?
.NET is this just giving away the razor while charging for the blades (something they want to do anyway and are possibly just piloting in China)? Does the number also include promotion and advertising budgets (beyond any give-aways)? And how much is for "real" apps vs. silly "$700 of free Microsoft Software" packages with programs like Free-Cell having MSRP's of $25 or more?
I mean, where does that figure actually come from? I imagine it's the total retail price of products they're going to give away. Or it could be the total "discount" they're prepared to give off stand alone or bundled packages (50% off each product X expected volumes). With
The bottom line is, this is a pretty silly press release/story. They can pretty well choose an arbitarily high number if they base it on the suggested retail value of product, when in actual fact, their actual net investment (variable costs) might be next to nothing. They're not even giving up opportunity costs if they're just competing against pirated copies.
Linux distros should do the same thing by assigning an arbitrary retail value to every freely distributed copy and calling that the open source "investment" in each implementation/industry/country.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
I don't blame them - Microsoft could easily slip some backdoors into the Chinese-language version of Windows, especially if they were pressured to do by the State Department.
The Chinese won't give up Linux until Microsoft lets them see the code. The question is, can Microsoft trust the Chinese? In the U.S., Microsoft could take you to court for breaking a NDA - they have no such guarantees in China. Portions of Microsoft's treasured Windows source code might end up in Red Flag Linux.
But Microsoft would be better served PR wise by investing the money in their home country.
Besides that, I don't look at MS spending 750 Mil over three years as actually spending money. 750M / 3 = 250 M / yr. For a company that has over $40 in cash and add about $1 Billion / month that isn't a very huge donation. They make that back on 1% annual interest rates. MS probably gets, overall on their cash something more along the lines of a 4 or 5% benefit. That's $1.6 - $2 Billion per year in interest.
$250 Mil isn't insignificant, but this is like piss in the ocean to MS. And, again, if they had donated that to US schools or to American industry, but particularly schools, then they would get a huge PR boost here. We'll see how China's Empire responds to Microsoft's empire, I suppose. Should be interesting.
If they don't do this and linux begins to be the flavour of choice, the chinese won't fall into the trap.
Liberty.
Now I see that I have been right all along!! I'm not really pirating MS software, I'm helping MS to maintain their dominant user-base! What's good for me is good for Microsoft!!
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Microsoft has to be realizing that it's better to let rampant piracy of their products continue
I'm amused by what must be the Chinese mentality: Share and redistribute Western OS software legally through the GPL, or illegally through piracy? Whatever, the government won't do anything anyways.
I mean, what's the point of MS giving them oodles of free software, when they'd copy it for free anyways? It's not like there's even a guilty conscience in their culture about it.
This leads to situations where companies that are actually making money in China (precious few) can't repatriate the earnings to the mother ship -- they have to invest it in the local economy, or stick it in the stock-market casinos.
there is no thing
what else could you want?
Zenophobia, the fear of tall, strong, white women.
I'm sure you ment Xenophobia though.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
He could trigger a revolution! :-)
This is what they did as a test run in Mexico. They know these countries are poor and by throwing a few million bills at them, they sucker them into the Microsoft Windows upgrade cycle. Linux can only offer reliable, secure, and inexpensive software while Microsoft just plain pays them to use Windows.
;)
Wasn't it Microsoft who paid $5billion for AT&T to used MS-WinCE on a few hundred thousand set-top boxes? And then they couldn't provide the backend software to run it so AT&T walked away with $5billion.
When you have $40+billion in monopoly money and billions still streaming in, you can start paying people to use your product when you know they will not be able to move off it in the future.
Ask any drug dealer how this works......They'll tell you it a sure thing.
I hope China asked for cash too.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
750 million on China, 1 billion on the XBox, 2 billion on XBox live...its all peanuts.
I kinda doubt Communist China will really be into Microsoft, they may take the offer, but I seriously doubt they will take any Microsoft demands seriously or convert to Microsoft totally. Microsoft is simply too much a gleaming example of capitalism and indivuality, the antithesis of what China wants. Linux if anything stands for community and socialism. Hell it wasn't until the last couple years that the Chinese kept indivual basketball player stats, and if a player out performed his team mates he was publically ridiculed for it. I doubt they will have a longterm relationship with anything Microsoft.
"there are only two industries that call their customers users -- those selling technology and those selling drugs"
unfortunately, I can't recall the origin of the quote
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
This is very funny for anybody who knows how the linux china market works.
Before you start, you have to understand that there are a number of Linux Distribution companies in China, most of the started small and rode the tech bubble there, raising capital on the hope of following companies like Redhat etc.
The difference in china is that prior to getting listed, they had to be 'blessed' by the powers that be - The communist goverment. - due to rampant quasi corruption, this usually means that if the cardres that added their blessing usualy buy in personally - and stay in (due to the chinese habit of sticking with the family).
What this means is that all the major Linux companies have very prominant central party members on their board. - imagine George Bush's son on the board of Redhat. - with no accountability stuff..
Basically the top guys are so tightly into the idea they can make money from their connections using linux, that microsoft is fighting a battle that it lost a few years ago...
Taking PHP to the next level: phpmole, php codedoc, php-gtk pear installer, DataObjects for php, ldap schema viewer and
Exactly. He's hinting at the old fallacy "What's good for GM is good for America". We see right thru you monkey boy.
m l
To see how well that GM theory worked out back then, take a look at this documentary:
http://www.newday.com/films/Taken_for_a_Ride.ht
According to this story on gamespot.com, that's the exact same amount they're losing on the X-Box this year. Apologies if someone else already pointed this out, but seemed like an interesting coinceidence (draw your own piracy related conclusions).
I used to think that World War III would start in the Middle East, but now I know better. The Chinese will think all the Microsoft bugs and security loopholes are a cyber-attack from the United States, when it's really just the products behaving as designed.
I'll bet it's just Microsoft "funny money", the same stuff they use to make settlement offers to the states.
Sure, they'll donate $750M worth of their products into a market that mostly pirates the stuff anyway. The actual cost to Microsoft should be maybe 1% of $750M. The bottom line is that widespread piracy of M$ products isn't enough to stop Linux. All those years of whining about piracy and now the problem is that pirates aren't working fast enough!
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WHY THE HELL the US has NOT YET placed blocks against US companies selling technology to commie countries?
.
Ugh. This is getting annoying.
::insert standard line about MS software being so insecure that it is a good thing the commies will be running it::
I [i]so[/i] hope that the CIA/NSA/Whatever are behind this and shoving security holes in all the pertinent software sold to the commies, maybe then for once they would actually be doing their [i]job[/i] instead of working on spying on us the U.S. people. . .
Annoying.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
That's right, Bill has finagled China into accepting green paper with his face on it!
Redeemable for all sorts of quality MS video games.
Isn't this just a standard Microsoft practice anyway? When was the last time Microsoft or the BSA actually cracked down on home networks which had 5 copies of windows all using the same serial??? The cash cow for Microsoft is in getting government compliance... tax the government... hrmmm....
Does it go on forever?
Isn't this a terribly wrong way to go about an advertising campaign of this magnitude? At 105,480,101 households, that is about $4.74 per household. You could pay a generous $9.50 per hour for people to go door to door (averaging half an hour per household) promoting the Xbox. Surely this would be more effective than any advertising campaign.
Efficiency, privacy and security proven in Communist China.
Marks, Mao, Gates, heros of the revolution.
Useful where free press is forbiden.
Making our enimies less productive every day.
Perfered by colective oligarchies 10 to 1.
You don't want to know what happens when you violate the EULA.
BSA, PRC, we taught them everything they know.
People who can only have one child won't mind the copy protection at all.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
actually, the U.S. is less forgiving of bribing foreign officials than most other Western governments. In Europe, companies can classify bribes as "business expenses" for tax purposes. The U.S. does not permit this.
Getting a nation which is -- considering the number of people in it -- very poor...to pay $100 for each copy of windows (ok, maybe its $10 per copy on a volume deal). Dream on.
Same thing with Russia.
Ditto with India.
Sure, they'll pirate your software -- that's free. But why pay for it?
The fact is that Linux is the future in Russia, China, and India. Heck, because these government's don't have to worry about BSA lawsuites or pay expensive licensing fees, Linux might even rejuvinate their starved economies.
Government's around the world are starting to realize that Linux is -- in every way important -- superior to MS. The deficiencies in Linux (read, GUI, Xfree, anti-aliasing, [minor] hardware recognition [moderate]) can easily be fixed using the kind of money the government throws around.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Computers, software, monopoilstic tactics, and technology asside, MS handles its business quite strangely. Specificly they issue very, very small dividends to its shareholders. BillG and friends would rather MS keep the cash then give it out to the other owners. If what you say is true and they have a history of large, apparently stupid, expensive projects, prehaps its possible the the BOD of MS would rather piss away there money then pay taxes or pay out dividends.
hmm....
Yes, but the X-box flopped
May we never see th
Consider the fact that China is the largest country in the world.
Now try to see that internet is the big antidote against propoganda.
Internet in China is unstoppable, and we will probably see a revolution in less than 10 years there. If such a large country starts participating in the industry with opensource software, it could tupple the balance for Microsoft. The Empire isn't stupid, they just can't make software.
This is a replacement signature.
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Playing with Linux RAID
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The physical layout of the ext2 filesystem
I think with IBM investing in the Chinese Linux market, to the point of funding the education of Chinese kernel programmers by publishing articles like the ones Zhaoway is writing, we don't have much to worry from Microsoft.Also, the Open Source Development Lab's Japan Development Center was kind enough to recently translate a couple of my Linux kernel testing articles into Japanese:
- Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel
-
Japanese -
English
- Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel
-
Japanese
-
English
These and the other articles at the Linux Quality Database are all so far published under the GNU Free Documentation License. I was quite excited when the OSDL first mirrored the original english versions and then provided the Japanese translations.I would personally be quite stoked if anyone translated any of the articles to other languages. There is also an article on web server application testing as well as one on C++ programming. I have more planned and invite others to contribute articles that have the general aim of improving the quality of Free Software.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
A concern I have is that Microsoft may expose Chinese students to their "shared source initiative", which could poison their ability to contribute to Free Software.
But I found this paragraph especially intriguing:
I know I would be very interested to read an English translation of Mr. Fang's book, as would many in the West! Maybe Red Hat could sponsor a translation?-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Maybe if the people in Microsoft's own country had more faith in them this 750$mil would be staying IN THE COUNTRY instead of leaving for COMMUNIST CHINA.
Wonder what proportion of this money came from outside the US anyway. Maybe Microsoft are simply returning money which came from China in the first place.