[Grey Wolf]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20202
Microsoft is claiming someone else is immoral...

[Rictor]

Oh yeah, Peruvian peasants competeing against subsidized foreign cofee growers is the same thing as the Microsoft corporate behemoth.

Riiiiiiight

[Bobboau]

but if you don't stop pirateing from microsoft, billy's next solid gold statue of himself will only be visable from a medium alititude orbit
(as oposed to being visable from the moon)

[Flipside]

LOL I've seen some pretty cheap tricks in my time.....

Oh, I'm sure a 10% drop in Piracy would create 2.5 Billion, but not for us.....

[Kamikaze]

EDIT: Err, NM. I suppose the UK has a sales tax?

[Flipside]

Well, in the UK, you pay VAT on stuff you buy at 17.5%, which goes to the government. However, I think the £2.5 billion is more likely how much money the industry would make from us.

It doesn't actually occur to them that if Piracy dropped 10%, they would NOT make 2.5 billion at all, they are assuming the people would buy what they couldn't download, rather than simply stop downloading and not bother buying either.

[aldo_14]

If MS want to really cut piracy, maybe they should give away free copies of Linux to the pirates so they have an affordable option?

[Zarax]

Maybe MS should follow IBM and all the other linux bunch...
Selling "free" software, with enormous tech assistance fees and outsource all work to china.
Then after a couple of years you will start wondering why no one is doing serious R&D, the economy is in shambles and millions live upon eastern charity funds.

[aldo_14]

Maybe they should just try selling sensibly priced working software?

  There's a reason why they have to offer vast cut-price deals and soforth to get councils & governments to continue using windows based systems, after all..........

[Zarax]

You can easily get Windows (and not only Windows) at seriously discounted prices, you just need to read...
Student licenses costs about half of the standard rate, something i hardly call overpriced...
Besides, since the average customer may barely know what linux is and get to the shops here he will find it costing €20 less than XP home.
Before saying "but linux is free yadda yadda" please remember that 90% of the users would buy an OS only integrated with their PC or from a shop where they can get at least help on how to install it...
I don't want to start a Microsoft VS everything flame, just to point out some facts...

[Fergus]

Capatalism my friends, capatalism.

[SadisticSid]

Capitalism, actually.

[pyro-manic]

Heheh. As for Microsoft, **** 'em. They churn out ****, charge way over the odds for it, and then whine when they don't get a nice fat bonus for doing crappy work. They can kiss my pasty white ass, to be honest.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Zarax
Maybe MS should follow IBM and all the other linux bunch...
Selling "free" software, with enormous tech assistance fees and outsource all work to china.
Then after a couple of years you will start wondering why no one is doing serious R&D, the economy is in shambles and millions live upon eastern charity funds.

As opposed to selling ridiculously expensive software which amounts to little more than a tax on owning a computer, charging enormous fees to qualify as a tech assistant and then outsourcing all the work to china.

Not to mention doing no R&D other than stealling competitors ideas (What was the last big innovation in IE pray tell?).

[Zarax]

Microsoft prices are on average 10% more "ridicolously overpriced" than competition on average on the consumer market and usually costs a fraction of competition on the professional one.
These are facts such as shop prices rather than rants.
If you think Microsoft outsources all work on china then i invite you to make a trip to Redmond or to see MS actual balance sheets.
You will see that over 80% people is in the US, and the vast majority of the others in Ireland or scattered on the local support.
For the sake of fairness i concede that MS has actually a small research center in China with less than 100 employess (on an over 40k total).
About R&D please tell me who else spends $6.5 billion on that.
Also, www.microsoft.com/research might give you an idea on their research activities.
About IE i fully agree with you, it's starting to be quite outdated...
Finally, please quit the childish rants about MS stealing this or that, they are frankly laughable...
All "stealing" claims made over the years have been either:
A) Joint development
B) Licensed technologies
C) Parallel development

Do we want to talk about stealing?
Just one small but well known and proved example:
Divx 3.x == cracked MS MPEG4v3 codec.

[karajorma]

Who said anything about divx? Just cause someone stole from MS doesn't mean that they aren't a bunch of thieves themselves.

Microsoft Office vs Open Office which is free

Microsoft Windows vs Linux which is free

I think your mathmatics skills need some work.

[Flipside]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics

[Zarax]

Fortunately my mathematics skills are ok
I'm talking about retail prices of course, not about what you can download on the internet...
Which is what the basic (and i highlight basic) user does...
But as i said, i don't want to start a flame on this, so i will stop here.
Just watch out for the hoaxes, as there is an huge mass of them about MS....

[karajorma]

A lot of FUD from them too.

And you're still not correct. Compare XP pro with Linux not XP home.

[Kamikaze]

Originally posted by Zarax
Maybe MS should follow IBM and all the other linux bunch...
Selling "free" software, with enormous tech assistance fees and outsource all work to china.

How's it even possible to "outsource" developers in the open source model of things?

Now, about this tech assistance thing... the most expensive tech support services are likely for large scale server or business installations. These companies can afford to pay a lot of money for a working product and to have tech support solve their issues.

Small businesses often can't afford that sort of thing, so they get linux for free and have their in-house techs set everything up.

However, the article isn't about either of these. The article deals with "piracy", which occurs mainly in the desktop user market. There's no "enormous tech assistance fees" for desktop OS packages. You just buy the box.

Some information about "tech assistance fees".

Redhat Enterprise Linux AS
Standard: $1499
Premium: $2499

Redhat Enterprise Linux AS on IBM z-series or IBM s/390 (note that these are *mainframes*)
Standard: $15000
Premium: $18000

Redhat Enterprise Linux ES on x86
Basic: $349
Standard: $799

source: http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/purchase/index.html

Suse Enterprise Server (24 CPUs, 16 base plan + 8 additional) on x86
$1478

Suse Enterprise Server on Itanium/IBM POWER (same as above)
$2098

Suse Enterprise Server on IBM z-series and IBM S/390 (These are *mainframes*)
$5,999

source: http://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpriseserver/pricing.html

Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, 32-bit version (25 CAL)
$3,999

Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition (10 CAL)
$1,199

Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition (5 CAL)
$999

source: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobuy/licensing/pricing.mspx


Note that getting a 16 CPU plan with Suse Enterprise Server is cheaper than a 5 CAL (not entirely sure what this means, the site says "users or devices") Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition.

To get a higher support price than Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition you need to get a mainframe support plan and of course comparing mainframes to Windows installs is silly.