Companies Coming Around To Piracy's Upside? 259
traycerb writes "The Economist has an article detailing how numerous companies are finding piracy's silver lining: 'Statistics about the traffic on file-sharing networks can be useful. They can reveal, for example, the countries where a new singer is most popular, even before his album has been released there. Having initially been reluctant to be seen exploiting this information, record companies are now making use of it. This month BigChampagne, the main music-data analyser, is extending its monitoring service to pirated video, too.' The kicker is Microsoft's tacit endorsement of Windows piracy in developing markets, namely China. The big man himself, Bill Gates, says it best in an interview with Fortune last year: 'It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not.'"
Old news (Score:1, Informative)
Larger software companies like Microsoft and Adobe have always known the benefits of piracy, the most prominent of which is the market dominance they achieve when people become dependent on the "Microsoft Way" or the "Adobe Way" after using their pirated software all their lives. They just can't come out and explicitly endorse the practice because it is a) actually illegal, despite what certain people may say, and b) it would obstruct theirs and the BSA's efforts against the "big offenders" like large companies, who they can milk for cash later on through licensing/settlements.
That said, Gates didn't make an endorsement of piracy, he merely stated a fact: nobody in a developing country is going to spend the equivalent of a month's pay on a piece of software, so if MS isn't going to get money from the deal anyway they can at least get market share for the time being before it's gobbled up by, say, Linux. Then, once those developing countries eventually move over to the "developed" column they'll not only be dependent on the Microsoft Way but actually able to afford paying for legit licenses and services from Microsoft.
Re:This part is old old news. (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, even the fact that Gates said it in an interview is (10 year) old news [cnet.com]:
"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
Re:Old news for most (Score:1, Informative)
Multi-tiered (possibly web-based) software subscriptions are where things are headed. The lowest tier may be free or dirt cheap and lack support (or offer very basic support), while the higher tiers offer additional features and more comprehensive support. Basically, what Google is doing. Not sure how I feel about that approach, but it's getting harder for the big guys like Microsoft to justify upgrading to the latest and greatest versions of their software when an older version pretty much does it all (think Office).
I guess it was inevitable -- sooner or later Word was going to do everything you could ever possibly want a word processor to do, and Excel was going to do everything you could ever possibly want a spreadsheet application to do. We're at a point now where in many categories of software there are at least one or two applications that pretty much do it all, and besides a few bug fixes and performance/UI improvements there's not much left to add. A small example: I've been an avid fan of console emulation on the PC since the mid 90s, particularly that of the Super Nintendo. I remember the days when the emulators were primitive and could only play demos, or if they could play commercial games they did so poorly (VSMC and the obscure Super Pasofami come to mind). Fast forward to today and you have emulators like ZSNES and Snes9x that not only emulate the SNES perfectly but do so even better than the actual console. They even have all kinds of extra features, like network play, video recording, etc. That said, SNES emulation is, for all intents and purposes, "done" and there's nothing left to do. Similarly, barring any massive and unexpected innovation in the world of Word Processing or whatever, eventually all applications reach that point. For the folks who put together ZSNES and Snes9x (both of which are free), that's not an issue -- to them, their long-term pet projects have finally come to a close and they can move on. For companies like Microsoft who rely heavily on the money they receive from sales of software like Office, it's a big problem. A subscription-based model, however, completely changes the paradigm in their favor.
Re:This part is old old news. (Score:4, Informative)