Amaranth Games - My Forum Entries

Re: Here's an interesting news article...

Subject: Re: Here's an interesting news article...
by Brycej on 2008/10/23 0:49:22

As KTC noted... it's not like Microsoft is scouring the Earth and getting on people's machines and knocking them out when they're discovered to be unlawfully obtained... it's more that if a user with a pirated copy of Windows goes to seek support or updates and runs a check... the checking software disables the pirated copy.

As for price competition with pirates... well, the cost of a CD is about $0.50... the time to duplicate it and the hardware (diluted over thousands of copies) are about the same so... should Microsoft (and all other companies) all sell their products for $1.00?

Do you wonder how that might impact product development... I mean, why produce any single product of any value if the maximum return on your investment will be $1... perhaps it would drive all products to be tiny downloads... perhaps that's not a bad thing.

Lastly, would competing with pirates actually change anything, or is there a "rebel" aspect at play here... where that if the prices were equal, the "rebel" consumer might even take the priate copy just to "stick it to the man"? I see a lot of anti-Microsoft sentiment... if consumers were going to only be out $1... why not just buy from the pirates? In which case, how much lower might Microsoft need to go to encourage these buyers... $0.001?

[edit] Microsoft, and many other software vendors have been in contact with several countries leaders with very very limited success.
Additionally, Microsoft does not review any other products than their own... as much as it's hard for some to believe, Microsoft is very heavily monitored for Privacy and takes the matter extremely seriously.