Slashdot Mirror
Only 244 Genuine Windows Vista's Sold in China
morpheus83 writes "Whilst Microsoft was bragging about the sales number of their latest OS Windows Vista, few would actually know that they have only managed to sell 244 copies in the whole of China in the first 2 weeks. You heard that right, and that's the number quoted from the headquarters of the Windows Vista chief (90% national volume) distributor in Beijing."
If you look closely, the vertical text on the right side of the Windows box says "Windows Vista Ulimate 2007". Given that we're talking about China, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, NO.
That's probably how many they would have sold in the USA by now, if OEMs weren't putting it on machines.
Where I work, people are scratching it off their new machines and installing XP.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Let's hear the Slashdot crowd claim, once again, how software piracy is not really theft
Well, you asked for it, so here we go. Software piracy is not theft. It is copyright infringement, which may or may not be fraud. The purchaser of the software, having agreed to the conditions of the sale, breeches his/her contract when he/she copies that software and gives it away. As such, most cases of non-commercial software piracy should remain civil matters between the buyer and seller of the software. It is only when the pirate sells the illegitimate software as legitimate software, or otherwise commits piracy for profit should criminal charges come into play.
That is why software piracy is not theft, and should not be a crime. As for piracy being unethical, I can see real world cases where it perfectly ethical. If you buy a software product, and your disc breaks and the company will not supply a replacement, I would not find it immoral to supply you with a copy of mine. But when we start creating bullshit words like "intellectual property" so that we can make software piracy look more like theft or that only pirates would ever need to circumvent a protection device, is where we start to point the ethic finger back at the software industry and tell them to look in the mirror for a change.
I think when you only manage to sell 244 copies in China you have to admit one of three things:
a) Nobody really cares to buy your product
b) Your products are far over priced
c) Most everyone is successfully pirating your product, therefor please justify the burden of product activation (including such features as limited hardware changes) you place on your legitimate, paying customers?
That is why no sane economist ever uses averages. They use median income.
If Bill Gates walks into a bar full of out-of-work drunk bums, the "average" income in that bar is suddenly into tens of millions.
A very similar scenario is playing in China where a tiny fraction of the population accounts for nearly all of the income from the economic boom.
People always post averages like they represent statistics of significant variance. You have to remember, if you have a value range with extremes and you factor numbers associated (in the case population to earnings), you need to get a number that works for the majority, not a number that is in between then extremes to accurately reflect the total. If you take a 100 people and one of them makes a 1000 dollars and the rest make 1 dollar, the total will be 1099, so divided across 100 everyone made 10.99 right? Not really, according to that the vast majority is making 10x more then they really are. *That makes sense in my head even if it didn't come out in the actual post*
Basically MS is the OS equivalent of a crack dealer.
Get you hooked on the cheap/free and then put the price up.
The cheap is edu copies etc, the free is the piracy. But eventually, as you say, the WGA starts to kick in and suddenly your OS starts dropping functionality. When faced with operating system cold turkey what can you do?
It's very clever...