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

One question

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you say "Business Software Alliance" in Chinese? Will they get to use tanks?

Up pops Clippy the hand Office Assistant!

[gowen]

"It looks like you're selling out your last few moral principles, in order to make a shitload of money from an oppressive totalitarian regime.
  Would you like some assistance?"

Re:Combat piracy??

[suv4x4]

Seeing as how China is the piracy capital of the world. I doubt Microsoft can do little to stop it. Having been in China, I can say that the piracy market is impressive. Every market you go to you'll find dvds, software, and everything else on the cheap.

Exactly the case here (Bulgaria) in 1998-2000, the piracy is ripe, and actually Microsoft is indirectly encouraging piracy (do you remember they didn't even require you to enter a serial in Windows 95?) in plenty of political and technological ways.

Then, when the market is hopelessly stuck with Windows (and to a certain degree Office) they come and harvest the crops, by launching a massive anti-piracy scheme, checks in firms for genuine software and so on niceties.

Microsoft was getting ready to go harvest in China for quite some time now, it was a known thing to come. The huge piracy in China is actually a blessing for Microsoft, and they have a well thought plan how to take advantage of it.

As a matter of fact, if every human on the planet was so honest that he'd never pirate Windows, we'd be much less dependent on it in first place, and Microsoft wouldn't sell so much. That's obvious.

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.