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Taiwan Forces MS To Cut Prices, Unbundle Software
bev_tech_rob writes "This article from ZDNet reports how Microsoft has agreed to cut prices on their software after a backlash from the country's effort to crack down on piracy. Seems the citizens were forced to obtain pirated copies due to the high cost and having to buy software they did not need to get the parts they DID need."
Too bad the US couldn't learn a little from Taiwan...
Seems the citizens were forced to obtain pirated copies due to the high cost
This is a problem most people under 24 seem to have...
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Taiwan represents a very tech-saavy populace that's probably a close 2nd to South Korea in terms of computing skills. Even if Microsoft can get just half of all Microsoft-using citizens there to actually pay money for MS products, they will make an amazing profit that will line the pockets of MS executives.
Taiwan is famous for more than just piracy, and your comment was rude and unnecessary. Most mass-produced toys are made in Taiwan because they perfected advanced assembly line techniques and could do it cheaper than the U.S.
Join The (1337) Clan If You Have What It Takes!
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
Yes, but while they're free, they don't necessarily do the job. Despite what many on slashdot say, open source is not the end-all be-all of software. More to the point -- what are they supposed when someone sends them .doc files?
(I fully expect to be modded down for this, but what the hell. I have karma to burn)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
It doesn't matter right now anyway - as there are no jobs available for when you graduate.
I would look somewhere other than programming to spend your education dollars.
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It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Think about it. 50 million lines of code. If you were to read 1 line per second, 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, year-round, it would take you 5-1/2 years just to read it all!
Then you'd have to understand it.
By then it would be obsolete, anyway, because it would be 1 or 2 generations behind.
If you've ever gone through even a 5,000 page program, you know that just getting yourself oriented to that you know where to look takes TIME.
Back in the '80s Microsoft was in the habit of screwing up/obfuscating the symbol tables on the software they released - until the courts made them stop that practice.
Shareware gets pirated en masse as well. How many people actually register their copy of WinZip? The reason software copyrights get infringed is because it's trivial to do, usually, and the likelihood of getting caught is extremely low. Luxury cars, Armani suits and "collectable" card games are all vastly overpriced, but most people don't bother stealing them because they're intrinsically harder to steal without consequence.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Cuz we can afford it. In a lot of other countries around the world where a worker only brings home $1200 a year (and that's rich for some villagers in China), how can they afford a $100-$300USD app suite? Enter the five finger or low cost piracy. Plain and simple economics, not ethics. And since when is M$ an ethical company anyway?
Possibly, but I have a feeling that microsoft would probably remove all comments from their source code and make the variable names all meaningless.
I don't think so - there is the Shared Source initiative from Microsoft. Obuscation of the code would be unprofessional at best.
Then it would be nigh on impossible to understand how windows works.
With all of the code profilers and debuggers out there, obuscation would only be a temporary set back. (*Avoids cheap shot about the average Windows user*)
I don't say this because i think they're evil, but it's common sense for them if what you suggest might happen did happen. Their source code is a close secret, and I dont think they would even want a government of any country to see it.
I also don't think that MS is "evil", but I disagree with the rest of your statement. Along with your Shared Source agreement comes an NDA. In that NDA (AFAIK), you state that you won't use the source to make your own version of Windows, nor will you help the competition in any way, which does make perect sense from a business perspective.
However, seeing that Linux and a lot of other OSS is in direct competition with Microsoft, they've basically removed you from developing OSS. Why wouldn't they want a government to be legally bound to not develop OSS? That's part of the strategic fall out from Shared Source - stealing mindshare through NDAs.
Using a WAR3Zed copy of the Windows source code to "help" an OSS project would be even worse, since you would have used illegally obtained IP and polluted the code, giving Microsoft both legal and moral ground to kill the project you contributed to.
Please, stay away from Windows source code, unless you have no desire or need to contribute to OSS.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
(I fully expect to be modded down for this, but what the hell. I have karma to burn)
Kalidasa's first law of slashdot: any poster who mentions that he expects to be modded down will invariably be modded +5 insightful.
It looks like what really happened here is that the Taiwanese gov't "implied" to MSFT that, if they didn't show some flexibility in app bundling (Office apps, NOT Windows), then they Taiwanese gov't wouldn't be very supportive when it came to cracking down on piracy. So MSFT cuts prices, and the gov't continues to make some effort to reduce piracy.
Ya, and I was forced to steal cable TV and uncap my cable modem and copy videos I rented all because they're more than I can afford to pay.
Geez, just because you can't afford something doesn't give you the right to steal it (or infringe on the copyright as the case may be). There are affordable alternatives out there to most expensive things.
47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
>>the citizens were forced to obtain pirated copies due to the high cost and having to buy software they did not need to get the parts they DID need.
How many people really NEED MS Office applications? Literally nobody. You can't claim on the one hand that Office applications suck and the alternatives are better and on the other that people can't stop using them. You can't claim on the one hand that nobody uses anything more than the simplest features and on the other that the file formats are a big problem, since the file formats for basic Office docs are well understood.
The truth here is that people used pirated copies because they didn't want to pay the price Microsoft asked. They're thieves.
> Yes, but while they're free, they don't necessarily do the job.
Actually they get the job done, at least for me last quarter. As a small social experiment I decided to use only open source and non-MS apps for school. I study CS at an all-Microsoft campus so it's a bit more of challenge than it probably sounds.
Open Office took care of my "office" needs just fine. The doc format didn't crap out on me often and the app itself isn't bad. It could really use some nice 16-bit cutesy icons though.
Mozilla and other gecko-based browsers took care of all my web stuff. My school is heavily into making use of the web (for better or worse) and I didn't have any problems using Moz even though the sites had huge disclaimers about using non-IE web browsers. Other than pointing out the fact that they weren't sending proper MIME types I got along just fine.
The stuff works, it may not be as pretty or arguably "user-friendly" (whatever that means when you consider MS's own learning curve), but it will do the job.
You're right, open source is not the swiss army knife of software, but it is a workable and viable alternative. The biggest problem I see is that there's so little effort evangelizing open source Windows apps compared to Linux.
I'd be a lot more comfortable if I heard something like "Oh, Open Office runs on Linux too?" more often. Or ever.
1) My last pc (purchased early 2001) shipped with Windows ME. Come on. What was I supposed to do with that? Had it been clearly marked "Unusable Operating System" I would have waited until XP was released before buying. As it was, I sure didn't feel much like shelling out more dough for yet another MS operating system --- and I don't think I should have had to.
2) My dad bought MS's Streets & Maps (yeah, I know -- dad, did you ever heard of Mapquest?) and put it on his XP machine. Then he tried to install it on my mom's XP laptop. Which it choked because it already had gotten hooked into his machine, I guess contacting the M(other) S(hip) to tell them what he was doing. I don't think my dad should have to buy TWO versions of Streets & Maps for one household.
But, these kinds of things backfire on a corporation. People eventually get sick of it, like they did in Taiwan. What goes around comes around, I guess it's Karma.
http://ob-la-blog.blogspot.com/
For most people, security is not important. Top performance is not important. Optimum configuration is not important. Control is not important. Not having to power toggle is not important.
Being able to put the CD in the CD drive, press a button a couple of times, reboot, and get what you want is VERY IMPORTANT. NOT THINKING is VERY IMPORTANT.
Users want things that work like coffee machines. You plug it in and it works. If you want a different coffee machine, you get a different coffee machine and plug it in and it works. Windows makes computers a lot more like coffee machines than Linux does. Having to turn your computer on an off to get a new feature is much less of a problem than having to know what to type to get a new feature. Linux wants you to figure stuff out. Microsoft wants your money.
For most people, giving up money is easier.
paintball