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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."
missed the first couple of sentences.
Pirate away!
But most people don't like the settlements and license compliance audits that eventually catch up to them.
But does the linked article come with instructions on how to install vista without getting owned by product activation/genuine advantage and with the ability to successfully receive and install automatic updates ;) ?
Does this surprise anyone? An installed base is marketing base. If people have pirated your OS instead of installing a competing product, the only issue you have is getting them to pay for it instead of convincing them to switch. Seems the former is much easier than the latter from all experiences so far. You also have the ability to sell them additional packages for your system without having to develop/sell such product supporting third party software. Another win, even if you can't convince them to pay for the OS to begin with.
I recall in the late 80s early 90s MS almost encouraged piracy, in an effort to kill off a slew of alternate OSes.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
...and this has long been one of the reasons I love to see Microsoft trying to crack down software piracy.
:)
The more they tighten their grip, the more star^H^H^H^H people will slip through their fingers.
This has been going on for years. Plenty of software companies who sell high cost specialist software applications accept and don't bother with low level piracy because it ensures there is a base of users who when they grow up/get a job will be most comfortable with that specific product. It has been the case for years in 3d design software.
The "logic" behind those comments vary little from the neighborhood crack dealer who gives the first "hit" for free.
Get you on the habit, get you hooked, then pay through the nose... so to speak.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Now that they've finally admitted it, will they stop with their WGA and activation junk? Activation is a pain for legit users, and now it seems that MS wants illegitimate users to work around it. I'm not really sure what it's there for anymore.
Um...no. The won the home user market through preload agreements with OEMs. The vast majority of people just use whatever is preloaded on the PC they buy.
It's easyer to convert users using "free" (read: pirate) software to legit users for the SAME software than converting users from an alternative, even if that is free.
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.
I'm running a pirated version of Gentoo, and that's where I'm staying.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
So, if I wanted to pirate a readily-available closed-source proprietary operating system for my PC other than Windows, what would I pick?
More Twoson than Cupertino
Apart from it now being about keeping people off gnuware there's nothing new about this, they were saying what, 10, 15 years ago?, that they didn't really mind the rampant piracy of their software because it would get people hooked and they'd come back and buy legit. Move along folks, nothing to see here.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
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
I often hear that people pirate PC games to try them out and see if they enjoy them, and then buy later. It appears that Microsoft is in a sense indirectly giving this argument validity. I.e. They think its better for us to try out their products, see if we like them and buy later, rather than using their competitors' software. Feel free to correct my logic if I'm reading this wrong.
Think of all the people you've heard of who won't use Linux because their favorite game or tax software won't run on it.
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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 >_>
Microsoft finally found their genuine advantage...
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
I'm sorry, I did not get that. Can you restate your analogy using a car? We on Slashdot do not understand analogies unless they're really bad car analogies. ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
Well, it is a crime to pirate software, so let's start calling the police. Most people call 911 when a crime is committed, right?
"911, what is your emergency?"
"My neighbor just pirated Microsoft Office."
"what?"
"My neighbor is pirating software!"
*click*
The user who pirates software is less likely to buy the product; this is a classic case of "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?"
On the contrary. After buying software that had demos that worked much better than the product, I have on many occasions tried a pirated copy before buying a legit copy.
Most of the times it was related to copy protection problems. I have a hard drive. The demo can be installed and runs fine. The actual product won't run without the disk in the drive. This is unaceptable and not stated in the product literature prior to purchase. Running more than one application at once is normal operation of a PC. Running more than one CD in the drive at once is not an option.
Programs which work get purchased. Programs which don't work or don't have a working crack, get rejected. I have simply bought too much software which simply can't be installed and run without the CD. I no longer buy off the shelf software without finding if it meets my needs first. Overpriced software is not pirated. It is simply rejected. For example, I use Open Office and the Gimp instead of Adobe Photoshop and MS Office.
The truth shall set you free!
Not only is not news, it hasn't been news for a long time. Here's what Bill Gates said in 1998 about software piracy (about 9 years ago):
"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." -- Bill Gates at University of Washington "town hall" meeting in 1998
So, no, despite what TFA says, it is not the case that Raikes' words "do not appear to echo the sentiments of his company..."
My blog
This is is a nice opportunity to point out that `unauthorized copying equals theft' cannot be true.
Ever heard e.g. a car dealer say: `We don't like people stealing cars, but if they do steal cars, we'd like them to steal ours'??
Or Joe Sixpack: `I don't like people stealing money, but if they do, please steal mine'?
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
That won't work for a variety of reasons; the primary one probably being social. "Yes, I'm immediately going to switch to X's software because X just reported me to the BSA and had me fined 65,000 dollars!"
Moreover, as the article clearly indicates, Microsoft wants consumers to pirate Microsoft software. They'll go after business if those businesses are large enough to make it worth Microsoft's while, but consumers? The backlash would be enormous (see the RIAA) and the gain minimal, if any.
Basically, you're going to try to stop people pirating Microsoft software... against Microsoft's will. Not only is that going to call Microsoft's wrath down your head, its going to turn OSS into some sort of anal-retentive legal freakshow in the eyes of the public, who will be even more repulsed by the 'communist hippies'.
What, exactly, does anybody stand to gain from this?
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
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's my post modded redundant? I only see one other post here on the same thing AND it's was posted AFTER my post.
I recommend you give OOo 2.1 a look.
I have some enormously complicated documents with hundreds of graphics and 2.1 is the first version to import them correctly.
I also recommend you open your wife's document *every* release and generate any crash reports you can. That's the only way it will meet your eneds.
2.3 looks to be a fabulous release too.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.