Apple and Microsoft: a tale of two piracy fighters

Stan Beer
Monday, 16 October 2006 13:08

Opinion and Analysis

Why are these risky plays?

As far as prices are concerned, Apple CEO Jobs hit the nail on the head when he said, "If you want to stop piracy, the way to stop it is by competing with it, by offering a better product at a fair price." Many would argue that raising Windows to prices as high as hardware in some cases is not a fair price. In the affluent West, most people will pay it but in the second and third worlds, this will be an issue.

One of the reasons Microsoft grew into the most successful IT company of all time, and in the process nearly put Apple out of business, is that it originally offered users a reasonably priced product and the freedom to choose their hardware supplier. As the cost of hardware has dropped, Microsoft has increased its prices to the point where it is no longer reasonably priced.

As far as SPP is concerned, it will certainly stop the pirate users but it will also stop many of them from buying legitimate copies of Windows some time in the future because it will force them to look for free alternatives in the present such as Linux. It will also create bad feeling amongst legitimate users.

We have in the past been criticised by some readers for occasionally basing stories on our own polls. However, we decided to let a poll run for about one week asking the question: Is the Vista Software Protection Program fair to users? Of the 1312 responses, 1033 answered no (78.7%) and 279 answered yes (21.3%).

Admittedly it's hard to tell from polls like this whether the feeling is really that strong among users. However, it goes without saying that many people do not like the prospect of being constantly policed by a vendor to which they've already paid good money.

Maybe Microsoft believes that all this will not matter. If so, it may find that it has lost touch with its users.