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Pirating Software? Choose Microsoft!
An anonymous reader writes "ArsTechnica is running a story regarding comments by Microsoft Business Group President Jeff Raikes, who had a pithy comment on the subject of software piracy. His view is that, should software piracy occur, Microsoft's desire is that the pirated software should be theirs. Potentially, in the future, they could then convert the illegal users from the 'dark side' into legit users who obtain licenses. 'We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products. What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software.' Obviously Microsoft prefers the market to use their software even if it's pirated, rather than the alternative: the use of free software."
Yeah, this is obvious, and I'd argue that it's not really even news. I'm not sure that Microsoft has ever tried to hide the fact that they would prefer people run their software, even if that means they're running a pirated version. It's just that they've never openly stated this until now.
If every person who pirates Microsoft software suddenly switched to Ubuntu and OpenOffice, suddenly the Microsoft lock-in (eg. doc files, wmv videos, wma audio files, etc) would not be quite as powerful as it is at the moment.
The BSA's latest study says $200 billion in software will be pirated in the next 4 years. Is software piracy "theft" like robbery is "theft"? If the software publisher prefers people to steal their software rather than use alternatives, how is that "theft"? Does the jewelry store prefer that their diamonds get stolen rather than having the thief wear cubic zirconia? http://www.bsa.org/globalstudy/upload/2005%20Pirac y%20Study%20-%20Official%20Version.pdf [PDF]
It's not even a surprise historically...Microsoft could have tightened up it's copy protection years ago, but didn't. Why? Because they wanted to be the standard!
Lot of people don't remember it, but it used to be that Microsoft software was the easiest to install. Other people were doing dongles, and phone activation, and all this crap, and to get Office, you just bummed a disk, and copied an activation code off the internet. Easy as pie.
Then they clamped down on the business users, and made a mint. Now they're working on the home users. I doubt they expect WGA to be genuinely effective, and I doubt they even want it to be...All it is is a gentle push to move some of the more pedestrian pirates into buying legal copies.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Here in Brazil, Sérgio Amadeu, head of ITI (Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia da Informação, Portuguese for National Information Technology Institute), claimed that Microsoft tactics are those of a drug dealer: provide the stuff for free or nearly free, get the "customer" to be addicted, and then get money out of him. He was legally threatened by Microsoft for saying so. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7654.
Which is precisely why Free Software/Open Source folk need to be even more anal retentive than the BSA regarding software piracy. Zero tolerance! Report em all. Take piracy off the table as an option and we can make some major inroads from people who can't afford Microsoft and other commercial products now. And later they wouldn't bother switching from something that they already know and is free.
:) So lets help stamp it out. Microsoft wants to make WGA even more locked down? Great! How can we help!
There really isn't an excuse to pirate anymore. In days gone by there just wasn't an option for people who couldn't afford software that cost far more than the hardware, especially in the developing world, starving students, etc. But now we can offer those people a safe, legal and effective alternative. Piracy is just unfair competition for us.
Democrat delenda est
Adobe has been doing this for years. And it works. I don't know how many of my peers pirated Photoshop 3.0 only to go on to buy a license for 7 and CS and CS2 later in life.
What I don't get is the validity of TFA's statement in parallel with Microsoft's scarily effective product activation.
Former paid users, becoming pirates after realizing Windows isn't
A) Worth paying for
B) Worth looking for your old install CD for
Not that that describes me, in any way.
Also, apple software is easier to pirate, excluding server. Don't even bother trying to pirate OSX server. Not that I've tried >_>
back in the 80s the easiest wp package to copy was Word (Lic key 123456789), so, when the big Corps were performing research to decide on which WP to standardize on, they selected Word because more people knew Word. Nice strategy Jerry
This technique isn't restricted to competing against free software, nor is it anything like new. Back in the early 1990s, a friend of mine in Jordan developed an Arabic word processing program. Their program cost $85.00, and was much better than MS Word's arabic interface. Nevertheless, my friend went out of business because people could use the unprotected M$ software for free. After all the competitors were out of business, M$ started using legal smackdowns against large clients to make them pay.
My wife is working on her masters thesis. OO.o is simply not compatible enough with MS office to be usable. A couple years ago I made a big push to go legit on all my apps. This meant dumping or paying for many tools I use regularly. I own Premiere 6 and PS6, but I was using newer versions. Dumped the newer versions. I was using many instances of windows not licensed, thus having a nice homogeneous network. Now I have a couple win2KPro machines and a couple WinXP Pro machines, my server was migrated to SOL18 (hey, it works for my needs perfectly), and my kids PCs are now running ubuntu and Wine for the reader rabbit software they so love.
When it came down to office I tried to migrate to OO.o because of the rather enormous cost of MS office Pro. No dice. Popwerpoint and its OO.o equiv were horribly incompatible. Word and it's equivalent had irreconcilable differences. I simply owned up to having to buy a copy and purchased the student edition, bummer it can't be in two places. I acquired an old site license for office 97 and am using that on all the windows machines other than the wife's notebook.
Until there is a good office suite with exchange compatibility there will be real trouble getting people off windows.
Until the linux community comes to an agreement and throws their support to a desktop linux distro and quits with the religious wars there will be trouble getting people off windows (linspire/ubunto maybe?).
Until the random hardware from the random computer store plugs and plays on the above intra-distro supported desktop there will be trouble getting people off windows.
Face it. While we can all have our boutique distro, if you want joe sixpack to use linux it the community must standardize on 1 (one) window manager, 1 (one) desktop, and 1 (one) functional application suite. Joe doesn't like choices, joe likes feeling safe with the default choice.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
It's simple, they haven't changed monopoly thinking. They have not recognised their actions could or would have consumers looking at alternatives. They were fully expecting everyone to migrate to Vista. Vista has had a pretty cool reception.
Very much so. Let me add my blog here on what I observed last weekend w.r.t. piracy of Vista:
Last weekend saw me in Low Yat, the almost world-famous place as far as 'cheap' software is concerned. No, I don't buy my software in Low Yat, I download legal software for free from the notorious places like Debian and GnuSolaris. My visit had to make with my dire need of some RAM.
Most obvious and visible as a non-event was the latest event of Microsoft. Vista launched officially on January 31st, 2007. I was in Imbi Plaza in 1998 after Windows 98 had been released. So I was for Windows ME and for W2K in 2000, as well as in 2001 after the launch of XP. Then, you could watch the sales-show of crowds of locals and Mat Sallehs, the 'white men', grep-ing their copy; and many of the latter customers taking copies for their friends and relatives back home; for at least until a legal version showed, from the employer or an OEM.
Dead. This year, dead. Low Yat was crowded as always on weekends, but the crowds would rather bother about the 4 GB thumb drives for US$ 25 and whatnot; but leave the blueish DVDs with the famous logo once too often aside like stale bread. I did ask a salesperson and was qoted RM 10 (US$2.5) immediately. Ultimate Professional Premium, whatever that version is called. Meaning, with a bit of haggling I'd made off with the almost original Vista DVD for probably RM 8 (US$2). 'Almost original', because it was said to contain all necessary cracks to avoid legal problems like product activation. In any case, I didn't dare to start dealing. In the end I might have had to buy it, and to me any write-once medium with Windows on it is a coaster anyway.
Now, that makes me wonder about those numbers published by Steve Ballmer, when he first said the uptake was slow and finally - after a dive of the Microsoft shares by 5% - stood corrected by himself, beaming with great sales results. The best I could describe the reception of Vista in Low Yat would be luke-warm. There are - I guess - two reasons for this: either the general public has acquired a deep sense of law-abiding attitudes, or simply couldn't bother less about Vista at all. Your guess which is applicable !
This is the beginning of the end. Not that Microsoft would be bankrupt over five or ten years; surely not. We will see Vista show on most desktops over two years already. Vista will be OEM-ed as one and only pre-installed Windows on new machines. Therefore it will take market share; and it will take a market share above 50%. But the excitement of the general public will wane to a point of almost complete dis-interest and un-excitedness. Exactly the opposite of what happens with Mac and Apple's followship. Since everyone knows that Microsoft products are simply overpriced (or underperforming for their price tags, whichever you prefer), this does smell like the beginning of the end.
I confess it in front of my friends of the FOSS community, while rumbling home in the Monorail, for the first time in my life I had a brief feeling of pity for the employees at Microsoft.
Why is this modded +5 interesting? The comment is either based on a very old version of OO.o or the author is just plain wrong.
Also, I don't see him mentioning any concrete example.
I've been using OO.o for years, even while exchanging quite large and more complex documents with MS Office users, I've had only very minor issues. Now with OO.o 2.1 document exchange with Word, Excel and Powerpoint is almost flawless.
We're even had a pilot with OO.o at work, we have found much less issues than I imagined. Now we're rolling it out.
Even while some MS office minded people are showing some resistance, we still haven't run into any real issue.