Microsoft To Invest Heavily In China

abb_road writes "As part of Chinese President Hu Jintao's recent visit to Redmond, Microsoft is announcing plans to invest $900 million dollars directly in software and hardware companies in China. The announced goal of this investment is to reduce software piracy and establish Windows-dominance in the region; what's not clear is if they expect the reduction to come from local business pressure or more direct government intervention." From the article: "To now, Microsoft's investment efforts have made little headway in reducing piracy. The company should be booking about $1 billion on annual sales of some 20 million PCs in China, says Paul DeGroot, an analyst at consultancy Directions on Microsoft. Instead, sales there are about $100 million, he says."

Comments

Re:Combat piracy??

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I think that when you compare incomes in terms of hours-worked per bags-of-groceries, that the $1 the average Chinese is paying, that it is equivalent to the $18 the average U.S. citizen is paying.

I'm not saying that the piracy is OK, but that the amount paid isn't so cheap as it sounds to us.

Re:China 2000 = America 1800

[mrchaotica]

I disagree. America took several generations to become prominent because of the slower pace of the 19th Century (due to the lack of communications and transportation technology). With the tech we have now, China can progress much faster.

For example, take the auto industry: the Japanese became big players in the US auto market about 20 years after entering it. The Koreans came a little later and did it in 10. There's speculation that, once the Chinese start selling cars here in the next year or so, that they'll be able to become as big as Toyota or Hyundai in only 5.