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BusinessWeek Advocates Microsoft Piracy
xzvf writes "In a lengthy editorial, BusinessWeek advocates allowing users in China and India to pirate Microsoft software so that it can obtain the same level of market share there as it has in the US and Europe. From the piece: 'If Microsoft succeeds in discouraging piracy of Windows in China and India, it is far more likely to drive the user of the pirated software into the Linux camp than it is to steer them into the land of paid-up Windows users. Microsoft's IP management strategy in China and India should instead focus on securing the victory of Windows on the desktops of all PC users. That may require deliberately lax enforcement efforts against pirated copies of Windows for the short and medium term. Only after the Linux threat lessens might Microsoft have the luxury of tightening up piracy protections, as it is now doing in the West. Microsoft can afford to be patient.'"
The "Apple strategy" of making software development costly is a failed strategy, as shown by the ratio of applications for the Mac world vs. PC world.
The point to remember about Microsoft is that their products are good enough for the majority of users or at least tolerable. Also, a huge number of problems in Windows are due to environmental considerations. If you install hardware with flakey drivers, you get crashes. How many hardware companies are out there developing their own drivers and not getting them certified? Contrast this with the Mac world where the driver authors are mostly Apple employees.
Windows suffers from a couple of fundamental design decisions that affect everyone. One of these is that it is supposed to be extremely flexible, so flexible that it can really hurt itself. For example, running any sort of script or executable code in the context of reading an email message is just plain wrong - but it is possible to build applications that make use of this capability with Outlook and (I believe) Outlook Express. This should never have happened but ripping this functionality away from the product would cripple some applications.
Also, it has been all about backwards compatability since the beginning of Windows. The incredible amount of damage this has caused has also meant that old applications written for DOS would run on Windows Me. Was it worth it? Absolutely, if you have a business dependent on that backwards compatibility.
Would it be better if application developers were trained and certified by Microsoft before being allowed to turn their applications loose on the world? It might make for a more stable experience for users but it would have utterly stifled the development process. Clearly the direction has been for more badly-written applications instead of fewer stable ones. The business case for doing this is obvious and I think Microsoft took the right approach.