Is Piracy the Pathway to Apple Profit?

An anonymous reader writes "Over at Apple Matters Chris Seibold writes an interesting piece hypothesizing that Apple's strategy may bank on people pirating OS X for their Intel boxes."

Comments

Re:Worked for ...

[AKAImBatman]

Worked for MS :)

This may be more true than you think. Back in the days of Win3.1, there were rumors flying about of revealing Microsoft memos. According to these rumors, Microsoft recognized that Win3.1 was the most pirated piece of software ever. The memos also detailed that Win3.1 never would have reached its current level of popularity without rampant piracy.

I don't have any sources to back this one up, so take it with a grain of salt. But if true, it means that Microsoft recognized that they never would have made their fortune without pirates. A bit odd, no?

Re:Worked for ...

[ssj_195]

Here's a random link - not precisely pertaining to what AKAImBatman mentioned, but very close:

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-212942.html

Key quote:

Gates shed some light on his own hard-nosed business philosophy. "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

Re:Listening RIAA?

[cooley]

I wholeheartedly agree. They know you probably weren't gonna buy that tune you downloaded anyway. They know that tune might turn you on and get you to buy the artist's CDs (or not).

They also know that if it's that easy for consumers to get music directly, they become redundant. Their tactics are intended to retain control of the artists.

No, that was not a flame.

[WidescreenFreak]

No, your statement was not a flame. There are several "incidents" that have helped to solidify Microsoft's dominanace, and piracy can most certainly be attributed to that.

The aformentioned incident about Windows 3.1 is most certainly valid. Look at how many people pirated numerous versions of Windows since the early 1990s. This allowed people to become familiar with the operating system. Then, when it came time for people to purchase a new system, what operating system do you think they would have gotten with it (assuming that they had a choice)? Some operating system that was unknown to the general populous, like OS/2, or something that they already knew well because they had been using a pirated version? Since the operating system came with the PC, Microsoft got a fee for that PC sale. So, whereas MS didn't profit from the initial piracy, they still made a sale later on and further addicted the user to Windows.

I still firmly believe that the "crack" for the Kinko's version of MS Office several years ago was planned. For those who don't know or don't remember, U.S. printing franchise Kinko's had a "special" 30-day, full-usage CD for MS Office (I forget the specific version) for something like $5. Shortly thereafter a crack was released that broke the 30-day protection. The change was a simple modification to a DLL file and a huge nuber of these discs were sold. I'm generally not a conspiracy theorist, but if there was a lot of concern for the "protection" of the "demo" software, Microsoft would (or should) have made it more difficult than a DLL file for protection. I also heard nothing afterwards about prosecuting the one who released the crack. So, for a few bucks per cracked disc, Microsoft snared how many hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people into Microsoft Office. I'd just about guarantee that the vast majority of those people are still using a version of MS Office. Whether those versions are pirated or not is another matter, but I'll bet that many of them are not.

I really would like to know how much of Microsoft's current dominance is due to past piracy. I'll bet that Microsoft would not be anywhere close to where it is now if there was no such thing as software piracy.

And how many of us have pirated a number of games that we otherwise would not have bought but were so impressive that we purchased what was downloaded and/or purchased any of its sequels or expansion packs? I would think many of us.

I honestly think that there can be an argument made that piracy can under certain circumstances make a product more popular, and Microsoft's dominance is certainly what should be offered as proof of that. I would be willing to bet that Apple would be in the same situation. I know a number of people that I work with (myself included) who would love to work with OS X but are not willing to purchase an additional piece of hardware that we might not be interested in afterwards. But we'd be glad to try it out on one of my Athlon XP/64 systems.

Re:Worked for ...

[DogDude]

Wow... Lots of bad mods today. But I totally agree. Back in "the day" (early-mid 90's), I tried out lots and lots and lots of pirated software. Today, I own copies of the best in every category that I currently use (my favorite small app that I bought because of seeing & using a pirated copy, is Textpad). All the rest that I played with that I didn't like ended up getting nuked. On top of that, in my days of being a developer, I ended up having my employers buy *lots and lots* of copies of various apps that I tried pirated copies of that I couldn't afford myself (like TOAD and more recently, XMLSpy). Take what I did and multiply that by millions of geeks and you have millions (or billions) of dollars of software sold, that wouldn't otherwise be sold (because I would have had no way to try them to see if they were worth using), because of piracy.

Re:Intel CPU != PC

[aonaran]

A lot of code that we think of as OSX lives in things like Aqua, above the kernel level.

Exactly, above the kernel level... where it is already abstracted from the hardware.