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Ballmer Says 90% of Chinese Users Pirate Software
jbrodkin writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used the official state visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao as an opportunity to complain that 90% of Microsoft software users in China didn't pay for the products. The comments were part of a discussion with Barack Obama and the Chinese president about intellectual property protection. According to a White House transcript, Obama said in a press conference that 'we were just in a meeting with business leaders, and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft pointed out that their estimate is that only 1 customer in every 10 of their products is actually paying for it in China.' Obama didn't detail any specific measures the US and China would take to help Microsoft and other vendors fighting software piracy. 'The Chinese government has, to its credit, taken steps to better enforce intellectual property,' Obama said. 'We've got further agreement as a consequence of this state visit. And I think President Hu would acknowledge that more needs to be done.' Microsoft did not say how it calculated the statistic that 90% of Chinese users aren't paying for Microsoft software."
Party beliefs are that property is that of the people, really you should only have to buy one copy for all of China, in this case I think they've overpaid, but that could be said for anyone that pays the Micro$oft tax.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
I'm your citation.
As someone who's been to Shanghai for the past 6 years and walked the streets, I'd say it's more than 90% in the public market (mainly on whiteboxes) than an international business working inside china. Not sure about the offices of local Chinese companies however. But wouldn't be surprised to find pirated copies in user share folders too.
Seriously, you can find a pleathora of XP, MS Office, and Adobe Suite software on a corner street market. Not to mention the un-godly amount of ripped DVD movies and Telesyncs. Some will even sell you entire portable HDDs full of the stuff.
Life is not for the lazy.
We compete with people who pay lower costs (legally) for everything from software to medicine.
Then on top of that, 90% pirate.
Good lord, no wonder the jobs are going over there. We should fine the hell out of any company selling products in the U.S. which were made by people using pirated software. But we keep those fines for U.S. countries and citizens while giving China a free ride.
This ends one way.. but it will probably take a few more years to play out.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's also worth mentioning that most of the pirated software found in China is sold laced with malware. Given all the SPAM and crap coming from that nation, I'd be curious to know the percentage of machine running pirated software constitute being the problem here.
Life is not for the lazy.
Rather than convince its citizens to send billions of Yuan to a US company, maybe the Chinese government would be better served to promote FOSS solutions like (Linux + Openoffice come to mind immediately but I'm sure there are other free/cheap office suites)
If I were an official in the Chinese government, I'd trust a Chinese forked Redhat distribution combed by loyal Chinese developers a lot more than a closed source operating system from a large US company to keep my secrets safe -- there's no telling what backdoors the US goverment asked MS to embed.
99% of Americans in Iraq are involved in stealing oil and illegal war... What is Ballmers opinion about that?
Didn't you hear? They fixed that. Americans returning from Iraq are now given a pat-down by the TSA to check for any stolen oil drums they might have hidden under their cloths. The problem has almost vanished!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Windows, and MS applications, could be a lot harder to pirate than they are.
They are not, because Microsoft would rather have infringing users of MS software, rather than have those users migrate to non-MS software. An infringing MS desktop is still an MS desktop, and MS can count it among their installed base, which works in their favor in all situations when someone makes a pro-MS argument based on installed base.
They even let infringing users keep Windows dynamically up to date!
You can't hold the view that all users are welcome, infringing or not, and then at the same time complain about a large nonpaying fraction of your user base.
Maybe their unwillingness to bow to the ridiculous "intellectual property" of the West is part of the reason they're doing so well.
And maybe it's something we could learn from. Apparently, putting corporate profits ahead of everything else may not be the only successful approach.
You could say that without the profit motive, we'd never get any decent operating systems, and to that I would answer "Ubuntu".
You are welcome on my lawn.