Saturday, October 25, 2008

Microsoft getting aggressive with Chinese Copyright Infringement

http://english.people.com.cn/90001/6518941.html

My take/thought: How does a U.S. or European based business, that pays for authorized, legal software, compete with a Chinese company that buys cheap, fake (stolen) software? It lowers their overall cost of doing business. Labor is already cheaper and it hurts the competitiveness of nations in competing in the global economy. That is the truth!

This boils down to:

(1) Microsoft wanting to be paid for their innovations and

(2) Countries/businesses being able to compete with each other on a global basis.

Those people who have their screens turn black can buy legitimate software from an approved microsoft re-seller and effectively push out of business non-legitimate software vendors. People who bought illegal software need to report such sellers to the authorities, who then need to punish/jail such offenders for THEFT.

Now, there are other options for those that DO NOT want to pay for Microsoft's "expensive" products. Go use Google's software or other software. See how it works for you/them in the global workplace. It DOES NOT work well since everyone else has Microsoft. Once they became the "global standard" the value of their sofware increased as the number of people on the network increased. The only people who can really utilize such software are people that use it for their own purposes or don't do business on a global scale, therefore not sharing their spreadsheet/documents with others, so that formatting doesn't become an issue.

Update: With Microsoft's announcement sales of Kingsoft software are up 50% in China. Over 100,000 people are now using their software and they are publicly traded in Hong Kong for those interested. Still a very, very small number but it will be worth watching over the next 5-10 years. I find the chinese culture is very patient, thinking in years and decades whereas the American culture is very short-term oriented, thinking days, weeks, and months (sometimes years.)

http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90781/6520298.htmlhttp://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/18/189890/news/Announcement2008InterimReport.pdf

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