This reminds me of the time that Steve Ballmer did an Q&A with Microsoft interns saying basically that he's happy everyone in China pirates Windows because then Microsoft sets the standard.
Reminds me of the time when the president of Romania told Bill Gates to his face that the Romanian IT industry has grown to where it is today thanks to everyone pirating Windows.[1]
I'm still wondering what went through Bill's head hearing that.
Do you really think "old" Microsoft thought that far into the future for this back then?
This was before the days of software becoming walled-garden lock-in subscription-ware; when quarterly revenue relied solely on the number of licenses sold and pirated licenses were seen as lost revenue.
I assumed they just though that if everyone had only legit copies, then Microsoft's revenues would quintuple overnight effectively turning Bill Gates into the world's richest man. Oh wait, he already was the world's richest man at that time. Nevermind.
Then again, people mostly pirated it because they couldn't afford it, so a strong piracy-free DRM solution would have probably pushed everyone to Linux right off the bat (nobody in Eastern Europe could afford Macs at the time), causing Microsoft's market share to fall off a cliff and not be the 400 pound gorilla it is today.
Those days Linux was not a viable options for consumers.
Microsoft was not in this alone (piracy in eastern part of the world), even companies like Adobe was in same situation and Adobe perhaps was more affected as they were smaller and less diversified.
But for them piracy in China, India, Romania et al. was not a problem, as they knew it increases user base and they can monetize that in corporates. The same people who pirate at home and school will pay for the license when they are in office (bigger ones).
Piracy was a training and demand generation channel.
> even companies like Adobe was in same situation and Adobe perhaps was more affected as they were smaller and less diversified.
Adobe didn't care about piracy for a long time. Up until CS4 a simple keygen was sufficient, up until CS6 you'd need to null-route a couple Adobe hosts in your /etc/hosts.
The result was that lots of young students grew up with Adobe tooling - Photoshop, Premiere, Dreamweaver, Flash - and virtually set the standard for the media industry once they entered the work force.
> Do you really think "old" Microsoft thought that far into the future for this back then?
I always assumed so, and same for Adobe. For many years, their software was trivial to pirate. My understanding is, they let individuals pirate Windows/Photoshop to ensure widespread popularity, especially among people who wouldn't be able to pay for that software anyway - and applied pressure to any business using their software.
There's only so much money they could get from the cohort of teens and their parents trying to play games or trim their photos, but every year, a part of that population graduated to becoming employees and business owners, preferring to use the software they already know, and having money to finally pay for it.
> Do you really think "old" Microsoft thought that far into the future for this back then?
Yes.
- they killed Netscape in the 90s because they realised owning the web browser market meant locking people into Windows
- they ran the Xbox division for years at a loss knowing it would eventually pay out
- they bailed out Apple financially knowing that a long term competitor to Windows meant a reduced likelihood of monopoly violations
- they had a long term strategy attacking Linux (even going so far as to call it “communism”) before eventually caving and public ally supporting FOSS
- the whole long term “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy is synonymous with old Microsoft. Eg Lotus Office comparability to sell MS Office licenses, then dropping support when MS Office became dominant.
- Windows 2000 and Me were never intended as long term strategies but instead as a gateway into merging the NT and 9x line of operating systems.
I could go on with examples from their dealings with IBM, Apple, Dr DOS, MSN and so on and so forth but I have two screaming kids I need to deal with. However you should get the idea
Honestly? In some way, maybe they've actually had a point. Beyond all the good things that FOSS gave us, what it also did was to commoditize software, forcing software companies to make money in extremely abusive ways - through advertising, surveillance, and forcing everything into being a service.
You cannot blame that in Open source though, nor even Linux specifically. It was companies like Google, Yahoo! and Geocities that really set the expectation for free software with the average user and they were companies built around advertising and walled gardens. Outside of tech circles, almost nobody ran open source. But most people had or knew someone who had free email, et al.
Commercial companies did this to themselves as they raced to the bottom with aggressive pricing and a need to dominate at a global scale.
Pirated Windows also ensures competitors are semi-permanently extinguished. 2007 is only third year for Ubuntu, and GNU/Linux is still the only more-than-semi-viable alternative for PC/AT other than Windows almost 15 years later.
I feel like a national government would be the last org to need to worry about licensing software, given lawsuits won’t do much and nobody’s going to start a war over it.
Never heard about Steve Ballmer saying this but I always believed this was (or became at some point) the plan. 100% of SOHO users pirated MS DOS, Windows and Office in Eastern Europe before broadband Internet became widely available. Then legal pressure on small business started so they began buying licenses as Windows and Office have already became the standard.
What I never understood though is why did Microsoft (or anybody else) invest in all this activation bullshit anyway. The only things working always were reasonably affordable pricing of legal copies, legal enforcement risk coming from the local police and the value of commercial support. All the software mechanisms of licensing enforcement have always been cracked and stopped no one. If I were to release commercial software I would only put a simple (no actual anti-crack protection at all) offline serial check to stop the most stupid and unmotivated people, everyone else will get a crack (which will inevitably emerge if the app actually is of any value) anyway.
> What I never understood though is why did Microsoft (or anybody else) invest in all this activation bullshit anyway.
I relate this to the adage "locks are to keep honest people honest."
Similarly, bypassing a valid license has to be just hard enough that people have time to think about what they're doing.
To push the metaphor a bit further, someone is more likely to try the credit card trick to shim a door open (type in a fake or shared serial key) than acquire lockpicking tools (download a crack).
There's probably some convenience factor there as well...
> someone is more likely to try the credit card trick to shim a door open (type in a fake or shared serial key) than acquire lockpicking tools (download a crack).
In theory this sounds reasonable but in reality - no, it's no difference. Serial, keygen, crack - it's all just a minor, negligible variation of the ritual people do when they want an app but are not going to pay for it (because from the perspective of an eastern user all the big apps genuinely look exorbitantly overpriced).
