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Microsoft Calls Today Global Anti-Piracy Day
arcticstoat points out an article at Custom PC, according to which: "Microsoft has announced that today is Global Anti-Piracy Day. Launching several global initiatives, the aim is to raise awareness of the damage to software innovation that Microsoft says is caused by piracy. ... As well as educating people about piracy, Microsoft has also initiated a huge list of legal proceedings that it's taking out against pirates. Microsoft isn't messing about when it says 'global' either. The list of 49 countries that Microsoft is targeting spans six continents, and ranges from the UK and the US all the way through to Chile, Egypt, Kuwait, Indonesia and China." Interestingly enough, unauthorized copies of Vista might not be harming the company all that much: reader twitter was among several to contribute links to a related story at Computer World which highlights Microsoft attorney Bonnie MacNaughton's acknowledgement that pirates prefer Windows XP over Vista and Office 2003 over 2007.
My major problems with office 2007 are found within outlook 2007. Firstly they took the IE HTML engine out, and replaced it with the Word HTML rendering engine, which means the HTML support is now extremely crippled. Also, when you want to print an email, the only way to bring up the print dialog is with CTRL+P. Which is fine, once you figure it out, but completely annoying before you do. The only other way to print, is to find the ultra-tiny drop down arrow where the print button is hidden, but that only prints immediately to the default printer, and doesn't let you configure any other options.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'm not sure who modded you funny, or why, because you make a very good point. Actually, in the absence of piracy, Windows would have a substantially smaller market share, especially in emerging economies. Microsoft has actually admitted this in the past, and made a pathetic attempt at releasing a shareware version of Windows that could run 3 processes at a time in order to compete with the pirates. Microsoft has to tread very carefully when they try to combat piracy, because the fewer pirated copies of Windows and Office people use, the more copies of Linux/BSD and OpenOffice.org/Google Docs people will use. On the other hand, if Microsoft does not make sufficient efforts to protect its trademarks (and to some degree, copyrights), it could lose them, and that would spell trouble for them too.
Palm trees and 8