Re: Microsoft's “We Share Your Pain” Program
shantanu_webmaster said:
@tech_your_future .. So you wanna Prove that Piracy is good and should go on... If this is so then there is no point in saying that Piracy its a crime... W should all say .. that yeah make 1000 copies of vista and Xp and all and distribute them all over coz Microsoft is having profits... DO piracy until the company goes in loss...
Let me explain it a bit further. I never said piracy is good or piracy should continue. What I am saying is piracy is in no way causing losses to MS. Otherwise why are they leinient on pirates?
As, I said in my previous posts, MS only makes 20% of it's income from sales of windows.
So, where does the rest 80% come from? It comes from services and hardware. So, non-software products makes a major chunk of MS's income.
Where does that demand for services and hardware come from? Naturally, it's us consumers.
What makes consumers choose a particular service or product? First is knowledge but the knowledge of end users as to technology that goes beyond those products/services is way too low, this is what all windows users are always shouting about - that the end user isn't supposed to know the working in too much details, it should just work.
OK, so if not knowledge then what makes consumer base their choices on? One is brand awareness and other is brand loyalty.
First is achieved by making windows available to the masses. But, many people cannot afford windows, so what do they do? They pirate. Now if you stop piracy those people will look for alternative OS. And today Mac and Linux are strong enough to pull down windows if those OS'es get a good customer base. So, you see MS let's piracy go on in their own interests.
Now coming to customer loyalty. How is that achieved? By vendor lock-ins. You create an alternative standard, which is incompatible with the existing standards. Since, windows is more popular and has created a brand awareness among masses, many people will rather buy MS products than those of the competitors. Now, that the competitor's products don't work with MS's products, people with not enough knowledge will tend to believe that the alternatives are technologically inferior since they aren't compatible with their current product and causes inconvinience of learning anew and doing all work from scratch.
So, you see, piracy is in no way causing loss to MS as you claim. On the other hand it's helping MS have higher profits and bigger customer base.
I am in no way supporting piracy. In fact the reason I gave up using windows in the first place is cos I didn't want to use pirated products. It was later on that I learnt about things with linux could teach
me but not windows.
Apparently, it’s success has prompted Microsoft to adopt a whole new quality management program designed to allow its Windows programmers to share users’ pains. Hence the “We Share Your Pain” 
