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."

Comments

correction

[Anonymous Coward]

s/non-democratic countries/countries where piracy is rampant/

Re:correction

[ozmanjusri]

When he gets back to Redmond he'll be in deep shit.

Precisely.

Microsoft's pulling out of the biggest potential market in the world because of piracy, like I'd be pulling out of Natalie Portman because she farts in bed.

Pulling out?

[Lurker2288]

Microsoft, when will you learn? Pulling out is NOT a reliable precaution. It's almost as bad as counting business cycles.

Won't happen

[nnnneedles]

Everyone who thinks this won't happen, mod me up.

Thank you.

leverage

[orbitalia]

They are just looking for some leverage to influence China to update its anti piracy laws.

Re:Shareholders

[Digital Vomit]

And why stop there? What about other countries who support terrorism, for instance. Are they going to relocate to Canada?

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"!

As westerner who atually lived in china.

[jjn1056]

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.

Re:All democratic companies should pull out

[Aceticon]

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...

Re:The real reason

[drinkypoo]

And think of all the applications that would be made available on Linux. Sweet!

Yeah, but the documentation would SUCK!

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