Ballmer Says 90% of Chinese Users Pirate Software 313
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."
Re:Where do they get these numbers? (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect this would come from Windows Update (which is enabled by default, remember).
No (Score:5, Interesting)
I have been to the crowded Chinese technology markets. They are fantastic places; it feels like Blade Runner or something else out of a Dick novel. Food stalls, people selling every kind of hardware (except the newest), all software everywhere (a lot in English, but most in Chinese), people of every variety (I, a big blond guy, didn't stand out much. If I had hunched over and worn a coat, most people wouldn't have noticed me.), and a variety of tongues. In the hinterland, the best spoken English I found was in the computer markets.
But if 10% of the non-Chinese produced software being sold was legal, then I am a fool who knows nothing about computers. I would say that number suggested by Ballmer should be far closer to 100%. There was nothing legal being sold in the computer markets, malls, or anything else I saw selling Microsoft products.
Oh yeah, the place is infested with computer viruses as well. There's no kind of virus like a Chinese virus that western produced AV products don't recognize. If you're going to do business in China, you should do it with a Linux based OS.
Not just the users, but the government (Score:4, Interesting)
I visited MS campus about 15 years ago and at the time they were fond of claiming that the Chinese government was actively pirating MS software for distribution and resale. They even went so far as to say that they owned the equipment necessary to duplicate their holographic license stickers to produce physical pirated copies for resale outside the country.
Re:Not just the users, but the government (Score:5, Interesting)
They, like most people outside of China, confused between various level of Chinese governments and state-own enterprises. There is no such thing as one effective Chinese government in China because every low level government and would find ways to cheat the upper ones and every state-own enterprise have ways to cheat on their government too, whenever they find fringe benefits to do so without making a big mess. It is known as "Policies coming down from the top, shenanigans mushroom from the bottom." These entities actively practicing the acts not because it is allowed by policies but because they just want to make profits for their own and nobody crack them down. China is effectively a lot more decentralized and chaotic than the US; and strangely this sometimes give Chinese people a lot more freedom in actions (but not in public speech.) Chinese central government is trying to forge a false image of unity, whereas US politicians are trying to forge a false image of diversity.
Most US debt is held by US citizens (Score:4, Interesting)
In the form of other parts of government "borrowing" from Social Security. Remember Al Gore and his lockbox? It was a way to tell us we were getting robbed by the financial elite (and to put an end to it)... too bad that guy never took office, eh?
Too bad our senior citizens are all hyped up about "austerity" and "deficit reduction" when the reality is that our debt is owed mostly to them.
Re:[citation needed] (Score:3, Interesting)
And I would say that by profit-seeking you are "feeding like a parasite off the backs of others".
Now that we've gotten the obligatory insulting rhetoric out of the way, we need to discuss what's better for people.
I'm not so sure that's true. It's what we've been taught, but I'm not sure that's true. There's an economist at my institution that argues we've reached a point where there is enough wealth for every living human to live comfortably and (as long as we are smart about using resources) it can be sustainable. Maybe we're just being forced to live these mean dog-eat-dog lives because it's good for the people at the top of the chain. That would be a shame.
Note: I say "we" meaning "you" because I retired in 2007 on my 50th birthday so I could concentrate on making music and teaching tai chi. I'm trying to live in a way that rejects the notion of endless growth. I talked it over with my wife and daughter and made the transformation from a "market-driven, profit-seeking" life to a decent life. Of course, it means we only have one car now, and it's ten years old, but we really don't drive much anyway. We don't have a large-screen high-def TV, but we didn't really watch a lot of TV. We had to re-evaluate the consumerist lifestyle thing, but we're still recognizably in the 21st century with handheld devices and such. It can be done.