Microsoft executive: Pirating software? Choose Microsoft

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    Microsoft group president Jeff Raikes told an audience in San Francisco last week that the company hopes people, if they’re going to pirate software, choose to pirate Microsoft software. What’s Raikes thinking?

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    Well, since switching from Windows to OS X isn't just a software change, but a hardware change, I don't know anyone who's made that switch (specifically because they wanted legal software, anyway).

    Being a university student, most people I know started buying software when they got a real job, and started making more than $10,000 a year; and they usually stuck with what they were already using.
    Good call, matthead. I changed the example to Linux, although the software/hardware change to Apple could still happen, however. It just didn't fit the context as well.
    To your question of pirating to legit, I can think of one. Me

    In the last three years, I can think of 5 games that I downloaded first, then paid out for. Why? Because they were damn good, and the people who made them deserved my money.

    As well as XP. Why? Because I wanted to see if it was for me. And it was.

    On the other hand, I can think of several games that I have downloaded, discovered they were absolute crap, deleted and was rather glad I had saved my money.

    Ninja Edit.

    I suppose trying the demo version would cover the last example, but more often then not, you get a gimped version. If there was a full time limited trial, that would cover me well, but so few companies do it.
    matthead: Agreed. Entirely antecedotal of course, but I've seen a rather strong correlation amongst friends and family between leaving university, getting a full-time job, and paying for legitimate software.

    I think Jeff Rakes is actually correct about the business opportunities of pirated software; if I'd done the "right" thing in uni and switched to Linux, I suspect it's quite likely that I wouldn't be paying for Windows Vista Premium right now.

    Does anyone else think that perhaps the RIAA / MPAA could take some advice? Razz
    I know of two people that used to pirate everything (OS and all) that now actually do pay for the OS. One of them even recently paid in the area of $250 for Ultimate Vista's upgrade package. Both of these folks do still pirate software though (at this point mostly games). I also know people who won't pay for their OS whether it's a M$ product or not but don't pirate anything else for whatever reason.

    I do find it somewhat ironic that it's sometimes easier to install the pirated versions of M$ products that it is to install the "Genuine" versions what with all the activation stuff.
    I try as best as I can to buy legit software--but I still think that software makers do a poor job of actually demonstrating what their new piece of shiny *does* instead of what their marketing/pr wants you to think it does.
    Guess what? Bill Gates said the exact same statement 9 years ago! In an interview together with Warren Buffet, he said, " China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours."

    You can read this quote at http://[link shortening domain prohibited]/3aa4xt (old Fortune article on WebArchive)
    You can also use software for free and it's still legal! Even if it's not Linux, there's a bunch of other software out there like OpenOffice, so there's not much of an excuse to break copyright, imho.
    There is still an excuse (whether it's moral or not aside). Using alternative free software doesn't always get the quality, compatibility, ease of use, etc. Plus, people are USED to the proprietary software, and might rather pirate it than learn to use something else.

    I was amazed at how slow OpenOffice Writer loads on my system, even Word 2003 loads faster (I refuse to have the "preloaded" background thing running when I use a word processor once a week). I still use OOo for the moment, but I'll be trying out Office 2007.

    Another point that would make MS prefer you pirate their software is that of licensing for other products to other companies/users. The more people that use Windows, licensed or pirated, the more people who want web sites and applications to be compatible with them, so other companies need to license things from MS (of course they're probably pirating the apps as well, but the app companies probably think the same way as MS in this), hardware vendors need to pay for the "Designed for Windows" logos to get those pirated customers to buy, etc.

    Plus, every pirated OS is one less license that goes to an alternative OS. Even if MS doesn't get the money, at least their competitors don't either.
    Back before Creative Suite, it always struck me that the piracy controls on Photoshop were really slim (i.e. just a CD key), and I figured it was for a similar reason as Microsoft is pointing out here.

    Think of all the 12- and 13-year-olds out there learning how to use Photoshop, maybe becoming graphic/web designers or what have you. No 12-year-old can afford a single-user version of Photoshop, and his parents are unlikely to want to buy one, so they pirate it. It creates a whole generation of people proficient in Photoshop who might eventually be in a position to make (or at least influence) purchasing decisions. As far as I can tell, brand loyalty in the graphic-design world is pretty strong.

    (For those of you who would have preferred turning these kids on to the GIMP rather than expensive proprietary software, I'd like to point out that in the days of Photoshop 6 and earlier, the GIMP sucked a whole lot more (in terms of feature set and usability) than it does today. The combination of the GIMP being better than it was and CS being harder to pirate might actually not bode well for Adobe, but somehow I doubt it.)
    Makes sense, Turn an eye to casual piracy of the software and when you become entrenched in the market you tighten the noose and rake in the money.
    I can admit to doing my fair share of pirating back in the day.. but eventually you get older and tired of looking for a download, worrying about viruses, finding out you have the wrong version, tracking down a keygen/crack. plus you make more money, and the opportunity cost of wasting hours downloading and cracking software is too high. I can just as easily buy it and have it working *right now*.
    Generally true,

    With the later Windows XP, and now Vista, Microsoft's software validation has gotten thorny enough that it's just not worth it to bother with pirated Windows. I mean, $100 upgrade for a product that lasts 5 years? Versus all the headaches of finding a cracked key, finding ways to get windows updates? It's an easy choice really.
    On the flip side, broadband makes pirating so much faster and easier these days. Don't even have to get in the car and go pay at a store and you get it nearly as soon. Smile So kids these days are even more likely to pirate than when dialup was king, regardless of pric differences. (Broadband speeds have gone up significantly more compared to dialup and early broadband than application and game sizes in general. At least enough that a multi-day download is now a few hours.)
    The only software I've ever pirated was Microsoft Software. Basically, it's not worth the money. Currently, I might pirate Microsoft software again just to see if it still sucks.

    BTW, in 1992 OS/2 delivered what Microsoft has been promising ever since.

    Joachim Holst
    Open Office is just about the only thing out there almost as bloated and huge and slow as MS Office.

    Really, I'm a fan of software like IrfanView. 90% of the people pirating Photoshop could just use this one free tool to resize their pictures instead. Much faster, very well built, and totally legit. The benefit to Adobe, though, is that every potential graphic designer in the world started out with digital editing using a pirated copy back in high school. They're going to pick this "industry standard" over anything else very quickly.
    I'm still pirating software quite heavily. But being a student I'm in no financial position to pay for the services. When I actually make some dosh I can see myself paying for software. So maybe in the long run letting people pirate your stuff to some extent is a good thing to build brand loyalty.
    Originally posted by NavyGothic:

    With the exception of Windows XP (which I purchased as an OEM copy), I pirated most of my software when I was in college. I bought a couple of games as I could afford them (Unreal Tournament being so good that I couldn't not pay for it), but things like Photoshop and Maya were way out of my price range, even for academic versions. The only way to get the software and enhance my skills was to pirate.

    Today I don't have single unregistered piece of software on my computer. Looking at my bookshelf, I see licensed, boxed copies of Adobe Photoshop CS2, Corel Painter X, Maya 8.5 Unlimited, and Cinema 4D R10 Studio Bundle. Tons of other software, too. Also, when I could afford to start buying my software, I switched (back) to a Mac.

    I believe in paying for commercial software. I don't think that just because there are open source alternatives that the commercial products should be free, too. But often it takes several years before the students among us will be able to purchase a license for the software they need to learn. I wish more companies were sensitive to this, but I think that the accountants watching the bottom line will inevitably prevail.
    There are 2 reasons I went legit. One, I was out of college and didn't have time to find everything. The other reason, I built a new PC. The new PC gave me a chance to start fresh, so I figured I might as well do it right.

    Some perfectly valid points made. Just as I refuse to buy a $15 CD for two songs and pile of steaming pony-loaf filler, I also make a distinction between scoring a copy of some old software to use just the basic functions contained therein (AutoCAD / Architectural Desktop from like, 4-5 years ago) and paying for software in which I actually use most of the feature set (Microsoft Office 2003 and Windows XP SP2, yeah, I haven't updated in a bit.) Would I buy a Led Zeppelin IV album? Yes. Would I buy the new Metallica? Nope. I haven't really liked any of their stuff since Garage, Inc. or S&M, which, hey, guess what, I actually own.
    Hmm, guess I'm still waiting for the post-college legitimacy to kick in. I'll buy games when the developers particuarly deserve my money (Galactic Civilizations comes to mind; I like their approach to DRM, so I've bought the game even though I've never bothered to play it), but as for productivity apps... I'd have to be making a lot more than I do now to be willing to part with several hundred dollars for an OS or office suite. Paying into the three-digits for bits and bytes seems silly to me.
    I don't mind paying M$ for their software. What I don't like is being restricted to the number of PCs I can install it on. I have 4 PCs in my home, so if I shell out the cash for Windows Vista Ultimate, shouldn't I be able to install it on all of my PCs without spending an insane amount of money? I don't think that's unreasonable. I'd be happy to register my Product Key with my name, phone number, etc, so that they could track me down if that Product Key ends up on 300 machines. If MS understands the value of having a massive client-base, let me install my legally purchased copy on my other 3 PCs dammit!
    I've been pirating Windows only during the XP era, previous computers were store bought and came with Windows already, then when I got into college I started to build myself and the lack of income/desire for ultimate price/performance over legality lead me to pirate XP (as well as other software, mostly engineering). But now that I'm out of school I found it hard to justify pirating software. Depending on how long you keep using that piece of software the cost per day is fairly low, so I've ended up replacing my pirate XP with legit Vista.

    For people who can afford it and still pirate, its sad. For students and the poor, then its understandable to me (and contributes to an installed userbase and domination by Microsoft, even if they don't directly recieve any money from it).
    The reality is simple:
    Using MS product > NOT using MS product

    ... at least from MS' standpoint.

    Piracy helped Microsoft by leaps and bounds -- it simply got more people using their products.

    Same here.
    The answer, unfortunately, is'no, you shouldn't.' It would be nice if MS offered a family pack like they do with Office, but they don't so you need to buy one coipy per machine. There are bundles packs of oem windows which you could look into.

    Back OT, I can see MS's point, and think that a lot of the comments about youth/students cutting their teeth on pirated software are spot on. The more kids learn to program using Visual Studio as a hobby, or even learn to type using word, the more professionals there will be using it for work, which is where MS really earns their money.

    I actually don't think that wga and other anti-piracy is really going after these types of pirates, MS is more interested in catching the stores and people who are selling pirated software to unwitting customers. Most 'hard core' pirates know that they're going to have to deal with keygens, cracks and wga workarounds and it only becomes a minor inconvenience (or even a badge of honor.) The people profiting, either by selling it or using pirated stuff for business, are the ones that I hope get caught.
    I have to say that yes I have used pirated software, however if the software is good then I will pay for it. Of course there is some software that is not worth the money they are asking, even if it is good, in this case I will find an alternative that is free, and most of the time it's better than the commercial stuff. In the light of Microsoft, I've never felt any of their versions were good until XP came out, there was significant improvement from all the others, and they have addressed alot of the problems with previous versions, however I did have a legit version of Windows 98 as well. Now I'm a huge linux fan, and use linux everyday as well. When I try demo software or free trial software, if it's a full version but timed, or something like that, then I think that's fine, however if it's disabled in any way, or annoying with pop-up's, I will delete and find something else. One of the things that I strongly disagree with microsoft, is them trying to attach it to a specific computer, and make it only usable on that computer, so if you do a major upgrade they want you to buy a new version. This is like buying a car, and being told that you can't take the engine and put it in a different car. If you pay for it, you should be able to do whatever you want with it, as long as it's only on 1 machine. I do understand that they are doing this to stop piracy, but it's still not right, and it really should be against the law. MS has a bad rap on things, mainly because it's the most widely used, so there are more people writing viruses and causing problems, much less they are trying to support all the hardware out there, but alot of the hardware manufactorers need a course in programming, most of your crashes and problems with windows is due to poorly written programs and drivers that folks are installing. I think however with linux gaining popularity to the common user, there will be a much more competiveness between os manufactorers and we will see much better and much stabler OS's in the future. I love linux, however since I'm a game player, I still have to run windows for the games I play, though I have managed to get alot working in either wine and cedega. At any rate, I think I will still be using Microsoft OS's in the future as well.
    Back in the day - FAR back - I remember autodialing one of the local BBS's with my Commodore 64 and it's 300 (later 1200 and 2400) baud modem so I could fill some 300K discs with the latest Warez.

    It would take about 90 minutes to download a single sided 5.25" floppy. Then of course you hoped there were no disc errors during the download.

    My friends and I Still managed to fill hundreds of floppies with the latest and greatest games.
    Originally posted by orionware:


    Technically, those were 170K floppies.
    Am I the only one who sees the irony of a company who leads its industry based on a history of widely pirated products? I understand MS not wanting to lose a buck but they never seem to associate their success with their LACK of copy protection in the past.
    I just wanted to chime in as a past user of pirated software that has done the the whole OS switch.

    Even though I'm typing this post from my work laptop that runs windows, I'm tabbing between posts about the latest version of OS X so I can try to time when I'm going to buy a new Mac.

    I think the strongest thing I learned from my years as a software pirate were that good software was worth paying for, as long as the copy-protection didn't interfere with the use of the program. If it does, you're better off with a pirated version in the first place.

    I also think that the largest chunk of money to be made is from businesses and professionals. Anyone who is making money their living with a piece of software and not paying for it is pretty low in my opinion.

    What do you think about the new paradigm of morality that I, and most of the users in this thread seem to have adopted? It seems that if you're not making money off a piece of software, then there's not really much harm in small-time piracy. In fact, if you can't afford the software in the first place and it eventually *could* help you make money, it's really in the Software Developer's interests to let you pirate.

    Kind of funny to hear this from Microsoft... I think this is the opinion of most monopoly or near monopoly companies in the industry.

    I once worked for a Large Graphics Company. Our group came up with a new way of doing serial numbers for their main product that would do away with piracy for good, but the product team stated that they would rather not implement it for the same reason stated in this article.
    I went from a legit copy of osx to a pirate copy of vista on my macbook. My fault for buying a mac not realizing that I would come to despise OSX.
    I just purchased my first OS - Vista. All my previous OSs, from DOS 3.somthing up were pirated. For me it was a combination of actually making some money now, and having WGA finally catch my XP box.

    This is less true than it used to be. There are two reasons why a large installed base is an asset: (1) network externalities (i.e., if everyone else is using Office or Windows, it's easier for me to use Office/Windows because I need to exchange files with them or connect to their networks) and (2) economies of scale for software developers on your platform.

    (1) is less important these days because other applications and OSes can read Office documents and connect to Windows networks. Back when Word was the only thing that could read Word files, it mattered more.

    (2) was arguably never that important from the standpoint of increasing your installed base through piracy. If someone is happy to pirate Windows, it's highly unlikely that s/he is going to purchase much, or any, software. So a pirating user provides no additional incentive for software development on your platform. If anything, you'd rather have these guys switch to a competing platform, because the one type of software development that they do provide an incentive for is malware - it's free to the user! (In addition, with more piracy you may feel some incentive to start protecting your OS through increasingly draconian DRM measures that invariably piss off some of the legitimate customers who you actually want to keep on your platform...this is of course a purely hypothetical scenario...)

    All of which just goes to show that simple market share/installed base numbers are of only limited meaning by themselves - what you really need to know is the composition and type of users that make up your installed base.
    Yup, I just recently switched from piracy to legit. I suppose you could say I grew up, but to be fair I don't know if that would've happened if it were not for the incentives to do so and the increasing difficulty of the cat-and-mouse game of pirating.

    I started with switching to Ubuntu so that I could enjoy being legitimate at no extra cost, but it was just too much like hard work (apologies to the Linux fans. I do use it as a secondary desktop but it's too much of a headache as a primary one with all my hardware and oddball software requirements)

    I also felt just as guilty not donating to the projects as pirating commercial software, so my conscience wasn't much better off and I was left with the compromises and headaches of Linux. Although I hate to say it, I actually prefer being told "this is the price" rather than the emotional blackmail that *some* OSS projects use to try and get you to donate.

    But anyway. When I thought about all the effort. And then thought about how I'd have to buy Transgaming to get WoW running, Bibble for semi-decent RAW handling etc. Microsoft's charge for Vista seemed much more reasonable... £67 (yay to Microsoft for allowing end users to legitimately buy OEM copies) for 90% compatibility... 100% once developers get up to date with Vista... and what is now quite a nice Apple-like OS that "just works". I tried the RC of Vista previously (legitimately, through CPP) and I could see that despite the rough road, they'd put their heart and soul into it. Giant or not, I felt that they deserved the money.

    True, given Microsoft's unofficial attitude to piracy I could've ripped it off and got away with it. But why, I'd constantly be battling against Windows Update fixes and other things that might break my copy and I just felt like being honest for a change.

    I've also been drawn into it because I now have a half decent job and can afford to pay for some software now and again.

    The funny thing is, Windows is about the only thing I've needed to pay for so far, as there are so many decent free alternatives now. Openoffice, GIMP, Quickzip, those are about all I need, plus of course online games which are already paid for (they have to be). I'm not 100% happy with GIMP compared to the pirated Photoshop I had, but given the fact that I don't have a mortgage with which to pay for Photoshop, I've learned to live with GIMP. Sure, some things take more time and effort, but I've learned that that's the payoff - want an easier life, then cough up the money.

    So really, I only originally converted because it was such a pain in the neck trying to pirate things these days and I didn't accept Linux as a primary desktop. But now that I've done it, I have a clearer conscience and don't have any particular desire to pirate anything.
    I have always been legit with all my software. If I can't afford it, I do without. I did know a guy that was as "poor" as I was, and he wore his many-gigabytes-of-you-name-it-I-got-it-pirated-warez badge with, uh, er, honor.

    Who's to say that Microsoft won't follow suit to MPAA/RIAA? i.e. "Go ahead, pirate our stuff. When the numbers look good enough, we'll start harvesting settlements for each and every pirated piece of software you have. You can either settle for a flat $<insert large sum of money here> or buy the full retail version of each app."

    <Off topic> What I would like to see is the likes of Adobe and all other commercial grade industry standard software companies port to Linux. Just because the OS is FOSS doesn't mean that apps have to also. Things would get interesting if all of a sudden platform choice wasn't dictated by 3rd party software supported platforms became a "non-issue". </off topic>
    I used to pirate everything.. games, OS, etc. I've switched over to the dark side of 'paying' for stuff, because I became too lazy to keep up with the WaReZ scene. I guess I make a lot more money now, to. But whatever. Aside from the OS, the stuff I pirated was stuff I wouldn't have bought anyway, but you just know the companies will still write it off as a net loss
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