Ballmer: Piracy costs Microsoft 95% of potential Chinese revenue

[n2doc]

By Peter Bright | Published about 12 hours ago
Speaking on Wednesday at the opening of Microsoft's new Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group headquarters in Beijing, Microsoft CEO said that the company earned revenue in China amounting to only five percent of that earned in the US, in spite of comparable sales of personal computers between the two countries. The reason for the difference? Piracy, unsurprisingly.

Ballmer rejected the common claim that software is too expensive. Though acknowledging that PCs were too expensive for many in the country, he argued that "if you can , you could afford the software"—and hence that rampant piracy in the country was a product of slack enforcement of intellectual property rights rather than software priced out of reach of users.

Even other countries with widespread piracy did not have the same discrepancy between PC sales and Microsoft revenue. Ballmer claimed that Microsoft earned six times more per PC sold in India than it did in China, and that if Chinese IP protection were as strong as India's then the market would be worth "billions of dollars."

Piracy in China has long been a bone of contention between the Chinese government and software makers. The Chinese government acknowledges the problem, and says it has taken steps to reduce the level of piracy. Nonetheless, extremely high levels of piracy are seen, with the Business Software Alliance anti-piracy group claiming that 78 percent of software installed in the country last year was pirated, down from 86 percent in 2005.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/05/ballmer-piracy-costs-microsoft-95-percent-of-potential-chinese-revenue.ars

[av8rdave]

1. Sounds like you Micro$oft guys got into the wrong business

[ohnoyoudidnt]

2. oh my

:nopity:

[lumberjack_jeff]

3. I'll bet they even sing "happy birthday to you" without paying royalties to Time Warner

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You

Damn commie bastards.

[SecularMotion]

4. We Love Microsoft Software Piracy in China: Bill Gates

Microsoft sold over 20 million legal copies of Windows Vista globally in the first month of launch while in China, only 244 licenses of Windows Vista were sold officially in the same period. Most preferred to buy the $1 pirated Vista DVDs.

Contrary to what you may think - Microsoft isn't losing sleep over the rampant software piracy in China but it's the other way round.

The "something is better than nothing" strategy of Bill Gates is that when people in China are pirating so much software, let them pirate software developed by Microsoft -that increases the overall number of Microsoft software users and some of them may eventually convert into paying customers.

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/07/we-love-microsoft-software-piracy-in.html