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."
Records are there to be broken.
The other embarrassing figure Windows failed to release was that they have 243 employees in China--revealing that the only other copy is unaccounted for but, curiously enough, has been verified as 'genuine' by the WGA website five billion times.
I think every single legitimate sale could be considered a victory.
From Microsoft's perspective. From the user's perspective it can be considered a loss.
244 copies ought to be enough ....
Microsoft: "You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips."
Hell, at this rate they might even top the 3,628 copies of XP sold in China so far.
Blame that one clumsy pirate who failed to stick the disc into his drive without scratching it 243 times beforehand.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
The irony here is that the box, the CD case, the CD itself, and the hologram were all manufactured in China along with most of the Vista-compatible hardware there is in the world.
That are 244 master copies for the pirates...
you misread, vista owns the selling in china.
always mosh clockwise
Oddly, the only references in the "story" (TFA) are a circular reference back to site itself and an unintelligible link to a story in Japanese. I see nothing that substantiates the claim of 244 copies sold.
...
Really poor submission
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
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
China has been pretty frank about not giving a crap about piracy.
Who are the 244 morons who actually paid?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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?
The problem isn't necessarily the money. It's the culture and attitude toward IP in the US. I know a bunch of rich kids in the US and most of them have never bought a DVD in their life. They download all their software, movies, etc.
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.
I work for the UK's largest online retailer of PC components.
OEM XP is out selling OEM Vista by about 9:1.
Retail XP is out selling Retail Vista by about 40:1.
Acutally this is helping MS. we all know that piracy is actually what allowed MS to become the de facto and in some realms obligatory operating system. The more users you have the more developers and the more other people want it. It's a cycle and piracy was what helped get MS to the top. That's old history.
Now say you are at the top, and your main competition is your old operating system which is sufficiently non-turdy that an update is not an emergency. What do you do?
Ceerainly few people will shell out the bucks to update. You can't give it away because there would go your OEM market. So you just have to wait for the sales of enough new PCs with it pre-installed to seed the market enough to get the developers to the point where they write things that work exclusively for it's new features that won't work on XP. (Direct X, and Widgets. anything else???)
that would be a painfully long wait. So how do you jump start this without selling below the OED cost. Let the pirates do it for you.
once the market for vista has healthy numbers then you start flipping the WGA boobytraps on. activate new ones each week so even when people work around them, the prospect of your computer suddenly topping funcitoning till you find an update to patch it (and how are you going to do that if your computer and your neighbors computer dont work) is more than Chon Wang can bear. Especially if it's a bussiness. It's so not worth the hassle that they pay for the real thing. Or at least a large fraction do which is the best you can hope for anyway.
I think that's the real thing that is going on.
in the mean time these low numbers are building their case. When they do turn on the draconian lock down they can point to these amazing, STUNNING, low lumbers of sales and saying. Hey we tried to limit the DRM but it cut out expected sales by thousands. No one can argue.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm in China, and I got sick of the pain of endless wipe/reinstall cycles with pirate windows XP. I actually called up the local rep and ordered a genuine copy of Win XP Pro. They we, so to say, ASTONISHED that someone would want a boxed retail copy. Had to special order it - took almost a week to arrive. I'd say 99%+ of Windows installs in China are pirate. Even local OEMS do it. Once it runs out of time, the normal proceedure is wipe/reinstall. Not to good for my business. But I have everyone using Macs. A rarity indeed in China.