China's failure to curb piracy puts India ahead: Microsoft

By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 27 May 2010, 14:22 IST   |    11 Comments
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China's failure to curb piracy puts India ahead: Microsoft
Hanoi: Due to China's lack of progress in dealing with software piracy in the country, Microsoft is more positive towards India or Indonesia than China, according to Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft. The protection for intellectual property in India is far better than that of China and the country's lack of progress in protecting intellectual property has led it generate less revenue for Microsoft than India and South Korea, he said. Google pulled out its service from China in March this year. According to American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, an increasingly difficult regulatory environment came in front of its members last month. While Microsoft is criticizing China's measures to protect intellectual property, Chen Rongkai, a media officer at the nation's Ministry of Commerce in Beijing, told that China's effort at strengthening the protection of intellectual property is universally recognized. Over 1,000 measures related to the protection of intellectual property have been implemented in the country, claims Rongkai. According to IDC, a Washington-based Business Software Alliance and market researcher, the value of pirated software in China almost doubled to USD 7.58 billion from 2005 to 2009. Though the rate of piracy in China fell to 79 percent last year, it's still higher than countries like India, Philippines and Thailand, said IDC. Almost 95 percent of the copies of Microsoft's Office software and 80 per cent of its Windows operating systems are pirated in China, said Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at Caris & Co in San Francisco. Agreeing with Ballmer, he told that to control piracy in China is not easy. According to Ballmer, whose comments coincide with trade talks between US officials in Beijing, Microsoft gets about three per cent of its sales from Asia, excluding Japan and Australia. He said that a country should buy a lot of PCs and at the same time, it should pay for the software that gets used on those PCs. Only then it can be an interesting market for the companies. But China has no such software market to speak of, he added.

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