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Microsoft Considers Pulling Out of China
icefaerie writes to let us know that a senior executive for Microsoft has said the firm could pull out of non-democratic countries such as China. From the article: "Fred Tipson, senior policy counsel for the computer giant, said concerns over the repressive regime might force it to reconsider its business in China. 'Things are getting bad... and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there,' he told a conference in Athens."
s/non-democratic countries/countries where piracy is rampant/
When Microsoft leads the way in business ethics ahead of a company with a motto of "Don't be evil", I know it's time ot look for aerial pork.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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M$ is a commercial entity. If they decide to pull out of a market there must be an other reason then the politics stated above.
My guess: M$ cannot sue chinese citizens if they use an illegal copy.
Microsoft, when will you learn? Pulling out is NOT a reliable precaution. It's almost as bad as counting business cycles.
Seriously though (and no, I don't mean to flame...) this is a good step. If more leading companies do this then maybe some sort of pressure can be applied. Unfortunately, if this doesn't apply to other large firms (i.e. Google) then this may be a huge market loss for Microsoft.
If Microsoft moves by itself, it opens up a huge consumer market to alternatives like Linux on the desktop and solidifies Google as a market leader in the webspace. People may argue that this is good (more Linux adoption etc) but is this s logical price?
Seems to me as though this is more talk to see what others reaction will be. I can't see Microsoft pulling out of such a huge market leaving it open to others with different principles.
Everyone who thinks this won't happen, mod me up.
Thank you.
Will code a sig generator for food
They are just looking for some leverage to influence China to update its anti piracy laws.
I'm usually on the other side defending MS, but this is clearly just a PR stunt. No company, including the slashdotter's holy Google & Apple, would pass up the chance to get at $1billion+ people. The chinese economy is just begining to ramp up, and they LOVE technology and the internet.
I suspect they are just trying to get some good press...
"Your Honor, my client Microsoft seeks to cancel these contracts because we object to China's
- lying
- unfair practices
- unprincipled use of its economic potential
- painfully slow turnaround time for patching bugs
Sorry, Your Honour... We can strike that last one from the record."
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
NOOO--, I mean, I don't think that's a good idea. Don't you remember how Canada was an entry point for the 9/11 terrorists? We-- I mean, those Canucks can't be trusted. Microsoft should not move here!
I mean, "there"!
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
This could mean so many things really.
First of all there is the crazy piracy which costs them huge dollars and causes trouble since the pirated windows spread virii like crazy. Also there so much trouble enforcing contracts. When I was running my IT business people would constantly try to renegotiate the price AFTER the project was completed. A not small amount of time people would just not be able to pay. Forgot about taking them to court.
Then legally you can't really know if you are breaking the law or not half the time. Usually if you are breaking the law come down to who you know. So it's hard for them to make project plans and then suddenly the gov't tells them they can't do something (after they spent millions).
I know a guy working on a TV movie in China. They wrote this super tame script and had it checked by the gov't censor board. Then after spending several million dollars and months of effort the gov't decided they couldn't sell the movie, because it showed foreigners beating out local Chinese people. So this makes it hard to commit the big bucks in China, you get nervous that the gov't will suddenly make some arbitrary change and put you out of business.
Yeah, it's sort of like this here in the US (and lately our gov't been closing the gap) but it's much much worse in China. Or maybe the foriegners all get the 'special' treatment, who knows? At least that is my experience, and I lived in China (all over) for a couple of years, and I have western friends there living in china as long as 12 years.
So there might not be totally humanitarian reasons for this, although there certainly could be really bad stuff here that even MS doesn't want to be associated with.
Peace, or Not?
I'm sure it's all political because the US couldn't survive as a country without China.
I would certainly argue that point. If you are referring to "cheap labor", then we would probably be BETTER OFF without China, and instead put resources into Mexico, at least in the mid to long term. At least if we moved jobs to Mexico, it may slow down illegal immigration as there would be more jobs. Transportation of goods would also be cheaper, and Mexico has a tremendous amount of natural resources. Moving labor to a country (usually) has the effect of raising their standard of living, which is CERTAINLY happening in China.
It would be expensive if the US quit doing business in China, mainly because we have invested so much there since the 1970s. But the US would surely survive. Who knows, we may be building computer parts in Cuba or Central America in 10 years anyway. Indonesia, Maylasia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and many others need the investment in infrastrure and would welcome being "cheap labor" while they built up their own countries.
We import from the poorest country in Europe, Moldova (former Soviet Union, between Ukraine and Romania). They do great work, get paid 2 to 4 times more than their national average and welcome the opportunity. They also make some very good wines.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
China will never take over the world.
It's only really used by the upper class or people who'd like to think they're upper class. Most people just use the regular material that plates and cups are made out of (whatever that it). Some even use paper to avoid having to wash up at the end of their meal.
Summation 2
There is no chance of MS doing this, would be commercial suicide in the long term and would have the shareholders gunning for the heads of the MS board on a platter
MS want something from China (probably better anti piracy laws/enforcement) and this is a a vague (and toothless) threat to try to get their way
Strange, but I thought that it was the other way around.
y .cfm?story_id=8038059 g ger_arrested/ l os
About Peace:
When I read the [1], I thought that the US is the repressive state. After invading in so many countries (3 in 5 years!) it seems to my that it is the most aggressive nation ever. Causing more than 650.000 fatalities in a war just for oil, it is something that even Hitler or Roman emperors haven't done. Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, admitted Bush. Terrorism threat has increased, according to CIA. US had more fatalities in Iraq war rather in twin towers. For what? Did you really believe that Saddam could nuke the US? He couldn't even bomb troops sieging Baghdad. Were he able to create big terrorist acts like what Al Quaeda does? Oh, come on, he had no transactions with extremists and much much more terrorist activity is watched in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia than in any other country.
About Freedom of Speech:
Yeah, that's the most stupid thing I ever heard. Especially after 11/9 civil liberties are literally gone. No, it's not only what I've seen on "Fahrenheit 9/11".
About criminalization of bloggers:
I know that China runs after bloggers, but what happened here in Greece, it was unprecedent. A web directory maintainer was arrester [2] for LINKING to a blog bashing a nationalist tele-evangelist [3], who btw support that us greeks have come from space, were spread throughout the world, we made pyramids, and with the aid of Russia will conquer the world and restore the Bizantine Empire. Ah, also that centaurs have existed. Oh, I forgot that a bookstore owner has been arrested for selling a BANNED book of Mimis Androulakis that was considered offensive to church. Also books of hime were burned in public in Thessaloniki by local orthodox believers. Does this remind you of Medieval Times or to Nazi Germany? I also remember that US citizens referring through a link (but not by plain text) to mp3 sites were prosecuted, at a court win of RIAA.
In no other country a referrer to a censored book or site was arrested -- even in China (which btw, is far from being considered communist, time has passed sine Mao was in power), blogs are banned or even bloggers are arrested. But no site owner referring to them was punished. Are we really a democratic nation?
Microsoft just said that to blind people that accused it for cooperating with the Chinese Government for filtering the web. Try to be objective... I know that this is difficult. When you in US were watching your missiles hitting Belgrad and shouted out WOWs, we were seeing human parts of babies thrown apart. I personally cannot forget one video transmitted by the greek public channel NET showing a hand of a baby lying to the scene of bombardment of a train in Yugoslavia. Did you see such images or you just enjoy Rambo killing thousands of evil enemies defending freedom fighters (=afgans, ironically).
[1] http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaystor
[2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/30/greek_blo
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimosthenis_Liakopou
I vote that all US companies move out of any countries that hold prisioners for an indefinite period without a right to a fair trial, practice torture and/or bug their citizens phones without court orders .... oh wait...
Oh, great. More jobs going overseas.
[This time next week we can only hope to see how wrong that statement is.]
If they say they will pull out, it is more that they are going to put pressure on the Chinese (and other governments) to crack down on piracy. If the governments think that they will be unable to easily get what they want from Microsoft, maybe they will crack down on the pirates.
Personally I hope it backfires and China ends up with 100,000,000 computers running Linux. I wonder how that would affect the perceived "market share" held by Microsoft. And think of all the applications that would be made available on Linux. Sweet!
I don't think you want Linux to be associated with China as your "marketing plan" to get people to switch.
Perception is not always the same as reality. So to the layman, if Linux = China - he'll stay away because he doesn't want a "Chinese" version of Windows.
Sad, but this is the level of understanding you are dealing with.