How piracy benefits Microsoft

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 10 February 2009 04:34

IT Industry - Market

Microsoft Office 365

And there is such a vast mine of information out on the web, a lot of it spurious, that people prefer to go for the simplistic, the absurd or the titillating. It doesn't require much effort to absorb that kind of stuff.

Hence, when Microsoft talked about piracy recently, few, if any remembered, that the company's own co-founder, Bill Gates, once admitted that he watched pirated movies on YouTube.

Gates has also, in the past, confirmed how important piracy is to Microsoft: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software... 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."

The next decade appears to have arrived. With income streams falling, Microsoft is now looking to go after customers who have, in Gates' own words, become "sort of addicted".

A last gem from Gates: his famous whine in 1976 during which he invented one thing which everyone agrees he really did - the term "software piracy."

This whine, mind you, was about a version of the BASIC programming language that Gates and the other co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, sold as their first product at Micro-Soft (that was the company's name when it started business). Gates' and Allen's BASIC was a modified version of Dartmouth BASIC which had been put into the public domain by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz.

Just think: if BASIC been released by Kemeny and Kurtz under a licence similar to the GPL, then Allen and Gates would have had to release all their own source code too!