Information Week Reports – March 12, 2007:
If you’re going to be a software counterfeiter, then please copy and illegally use Microsoft products.
The above plea isn’t from a posting on a hacker forum. Rather, it’s how Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes feels about software counterfeiters. “If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else,” Raikes said.
The remarks might seem surprising, coming from a senior executive at a software company that spends millions each year fighting software piracy and developing copyright protection technologies.
But Raikes, speaking last week at the Morgan Stanley Technology conference in San Francisco, said a certain amount of software piracy actually helps Microsoft because it can lead to purchases by individuals who otherwise might never have been exposed to the company’s products.
“We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products,” Raikes said. “What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software.”
“You want to push towards getting legal licensing, but you don’t want to push so hard that you lose the asset that’s most fundamental in the business,” said Raikes, who estimated that between 20% and 25% of all software used in the United States is pirated.
“a certain amount of software piracy actually helps Microsoft because it can lead to purchases by individuals who otherwise might never have been exposed to the company’s products.”Also gets them locked in.This has always been known by the tech community.
“We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products,”
This is why kids; you should own this stock.
Maybe the increased difficulty of cracking the Vista Advantage scheme is causing less people to try then buy Vista? (That, and the fact that it runs slower than XP and has more hardware incompatibilities).
Vista isn’t worth stealing … sort of like Windows ME. My next desktop will be Ubuntu with Beryl. That should be enough eye candy ffor me.
Interesting that MS gets the connection between incidental or impulsive “piracy” (unlicensed use) and the potential market growth that free exposure can bring.
Compare that with the entertainment industry, where the RIAA killed its own best user community (Zapster) and Viacom is trying to kill the incredible buzz factory that is YouTube. If I had an ownership stake in any company that attacked its own most enthusiastic users that way, I’d be furious about that. Good reason not to own those stocks.
Microsoft doesn’t begin to benefit that directly. If Raikes is floating a MS policy balloon, all I can say is, good for them and maria (#1) may be right. Maybe someone here at DU has insight into whether this signals a shift in MS policy.
Makes lots of sence.
Its all about market share….
Ibm gave away millions of copies of OS2
As a way to continue to squash the competition this makes perfect sense: Either way they’re not using the competition.
this probably isn’t about Vista as much as it is about Office. think of all the small businesses out there using MS Office who would be much, much better served by something like OpenOffice. the company i work for isn’t that large, but the upgrade of our division to Office 2k3 was going to cost about a half a million US clams. when i sat and thought about it, 80-90 percent of our users have MS Office installed and use Outlook, very basic Excel spreadsheets, and word. only a handful use very advanced spreadsheets which have a lot of development time invested in them. chances are the OpenOffice spreadsheet would work for those too if someone took the time to port them over.
this is the same business practice crack dealers employ, right? go ahead and try it for free. when you decide you can’t live without it, fork over a mountain of cash. then multiply that by the number of business licensees and repeat every few years and you have a green paper cow.
#5
But no one cared about OS/2 even if it was free.
Actually OS/2 Was a better operating system at the time because it was a graphical interfaces multi tasking/ multi user.
Microsoft had a large installed loyal base of users that didn’t want to chance migrating to OS2 because IBM’s track record was bad.
In addition not all software was compatable
I for one, was given several free copies of it that I never installed…They ended up in the garbage.
Microsoft charges too much. Burning a CD costs maybe 50 cents max. It shold be illegal to charge more than $1 per CD, which still leaves producers a >100% profit margin.
Actually, I have to disagree. When you compare os/2 warp to windows nt, it is obvious why industry chose windows over OS/2. OS/2 at the time was focused on running multiple DOS applications, and had a very quirky way of running windows applications.
In the enterprise space, IBM was all about trying to enhance DOS applications in a multi tasking sort of way, while at the same time, Windows NT was focused, like a laser, on the mini computer market. For example, all the mini-computer interop applications on OS/2 were to access your mini-computer on your os/2 terminal. There were a whole bunch of really clunky dos applications. I remember working on screen scraping applications at the time. While at the time, Microsoft was buying up companies like Foxpro, and they released
Access. Access was neat, because it could connect directly to your minicomputer database files. No more screen scraping. Also, at the time, the Access report writer was years ahead of report writing on mini-computers.
Also, IBM was a services company. Microsoft wanted to give the users the ability to make the software for their computer. IBM wanted to keep those services in house. To quote Balmer, “Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!” In the business space, Visual Basic was a coup in software development in the early 90’s. Nobody had anything even remotely close to it.
As, almost no one uses mini-computers anymore, it is obvious who had the greater strategic vision. Nowadays, people are basically attributing Microsoft’s success to some satanic power that Bill Gates had over the basic computer user. No, they won the operating system wars because they really were that much better than every other player at the time.
#10 – You are kidding right?
I’d never thought I’d see this kind of intelligence in a big corporation. It’s true, most people I know who used to pirate software ultimately wound up buying it.
Thats a trick…
MOST hackers want to SEE/USE something, before buying it.
Once they are satisfied they generally BUY the product.
Who wants to pay $200 for something when YOU MAY not like it.
#7,
I think Google office applications are more of a threat to Microsoft’s office product than OO is. I have tried OO several times now… I really can’t empathise with what the Digg and Slashdot user base see in it. In my workplace we use Excel (although there is a definite organic migration happening to Google calc) and publisher. Generally, for what we do with it, it is worth every penny. At the same time, we are still using Office 2000 and I detect precisely zero interest in my users to upgrade. I am starting to hear a desire from users to migrate accounting to Dynamics. For whatever reason Power point and word never caught on in our office.
We migrated from Exchange (sbs version from nt 4.0 days) to internally hosted web mail, to gmail. All the users were chomping at the bit to migrate to gmail.
I still use Access liberally as glue to hold everything together, but no one besides me actually uses Access. I look at OO Base, and my reaction is along the lines of, “What were they thinking?!?”
#16 – …like maybe, add a grammar check to your web browser 🙂 ?
#17, C’mon, give Pedro some credit. English isn’t his first language. And I think he does a pretty good job, better then a lot of native American speakers.
Unless, of course, I am totally out to lunch on this one.
***
Google Office just doesn’t sound right. Why use an application that is totally dependent upon an internet connection and a high speed one at that. If it was based upon an internal server then that would be very different. Open Office can do everything 95% of users require.
MS is seeing little interest in the latest Office suite so I think they will do anything to get it out there. As James in #7 put it, the pirate version is just to get you hooked, then you pay through the nose.
Heh, “pirated”… I still love that term…
Piracy involves taking something PHYSICAL from another. Copying software IS NOT PIRACY. However, SELLING COPIED SOFTWARE IS PIRACY!!!
Of course, IF YOU NEVER WOULD BUY THEIR OPERATING SYSTEMS