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Microsoft Cuts Vista Price To $66 In China
narramissic writes "Microsoft this week cut the retail price of Windows Vista Home Basic in China by 67% — from 1,521 renminbi to 499 renminbi ($65.80). This is a steep discount compared to what users in the US and elsewhere are charged for the software. The reason for the price reduction? Battling piracy, of course. The new pricing 'narrows the price gap between original versions of Microsoft's software and pirated copies,' making it that much easier for consumers to 'do the right thing.'"
IT's silly, why pay $66 bucks for a copy of watered down Dista when you can steal Ultimate? I mean, if you are in a country that has no IP enforcment, why not just steal the best one?
This is my sig.
Does this mean we need more piracy in the US to bring the price down?
Maybe we'd like to do the right thing here for a dollar amount that gets closer to 0, too.
Fortunately for me, I'm happy enough with my games in XP - it's just a platform, after all.
So what is that, like 2 months of a person's income there?
Reduce it to two or three day's income like it is here for the average person. Then you'll hit the point where they can afford it instead of stealing it.
MS does it in China; yet here in the western world, the software companies use piracy as an excuse to need to raise prices. (To recoup alleged losses from e-shrink)
I hate to say it, but,... even "pirated Windows Vista" is still "Windows Vista",... you're better off sticking with Windows XP, ... or MacOS X ... or Linux.
So are we saying there is a good side to piracy? Shocking!! You mean the music industry could have just reduced their prices to compete with piracy instead of sueing every single person?
If everyone had to opt-in to pay an extra for $90 every time they bought a computer at Best Buy, you'd see a lot of piracy too.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Microsoft was always been weak on piracy prevention. They've always known it helps them to solidify their stranglehold on the market. But they'd rather have the best of both worlds:
Posturing about how piracy is wrong and illegal. Threaten. Remind people of the legal consequences, then drop prices. Most will continue to pirate regardless, some will be frightened into/enticed to buy a legal copy. They srengthen their market dominance AND sell their O/S. Perfect. It's a win-win (pun intended) situation for Microsoft.
Honestly, when was the last time you saw Microsoft going after end users like the *IAA does? (SCO-related conspiracy theories aside).
It's very similar to how one needs to protect their patents to retain them; Microsoft needs to at the least pretend that they're losing out to piracy, and pretend that they're trying hard to stop it. Otherwise, can you imagine the anti-trust allegations?
How is buying a legitimate licence which activates and passes all Microsofts checks copyright infringement?
Perhaps it could be a licencing issue, if the licence specifically says for use with a Chinese OS only. However, last time I checked and English Vista pack, it didn't say anything about that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Perhaps because in China, stealing is still treated as a serious crime, and is often (I think) enforced quite heavily. A better course of action for people in China would be to infringe on the copyright, which is not seriously enforced.
Unless, of course, you've fallen into the semantics of the stop-copyright-infringement lobby groups, who would love it if everyone saw the complicated artificial legal definition of copyright infringement as being equivalent to horrible crime of stealing. In that case, yes, they should steal the best one.