PiracyRUs: Microsoft asks users who steal software to steal from them

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 14 March 2007 22:11

Opinion and Analysis

In many ways, it is a small step towards something like that, but while Vista and Office remain the massive cash cows that they are, there’s little incentive for Microsoft to change its business tactics – at least until something like Google Apps matures significantly and becomes a real threat to the bottom line.

Then Microsoft may, as they have before, turned on a dime ‘late’ to the game, eventually over a period of years ending up the dominant provider in that particular space.

It happened with Netscape, but once that was beaten by Internet Explorer, it took a resurgent browser competitor in Firefox to once again coax Microsoft into action, with IE7 long overdue, despite actually being a very capable browser that goes a very long way to answering many of Firefox’s challenges – although not all of them.

So… piracy has become the tiniest bit approved in certain circumstances by Microsoft. In the wonderful world of the rapid pace of technological change, one can only imagine and wonder what the future really holds, with the likelihood that it will entail changes and benefits of a magnitude that we still truly haven’t yet imagined or grasped. It sure is a great time to be alive!