Only 244 Genuine Windows Vista's Sold in China 457
morpheus83 writes "Whilst Microsoft was bragging about the sales number of their latest OS Windows Vista, few would actually know that they have only managed to sell 244 copies in the whole of China in the first 2 weeks. You heard that right, and that's the number quoted from the headquarters of the Windows Vista chief (90% national volume) distributor in Beijing."
Is that a genuine Windows SKU? (Score:5, Insightful)
So. (Score:5, Insightful)
Where I work, people are scratching it off their new machines and installing XP.
China: open source paradise (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't this the same slashdot that celebrates mass piracy? We all know that the chinese don't buy software, music, or movies and for some bizarre reason everyone on slashdot celebrates it. They are taking money from us-- they are blatantly robbing our largest industries. This isn't bringing us any closer to the magical open source commune you people envision for the future, it's only bringing us closer to poverty.
What do you think the US's role is in the world market? How many of you work in steel, ammonia, or aerospace?
I don't suppose any of you work in software, which depends on sales- possibly web industries that depend on paying customers who aren't buying bootleg products- maybe even the financial industry, which is adversely affected by the lack of revenue our media firms and software companies see out of China.
Stop being fanboys and start thinking like we're competing in a world market and our jobs are not secure.
I suppose you'd all like to see the market shift to an open source model, where all the code is written in east europe and china where its cheaper, and those of us who once wrote software here are then waiting tables for the executives and managers who were smart enough to outsource all their R&D and engineering as soon as possible.
Selling software, entertainment products, and media in China is really the best outcome for our middle class- it doesn't only benefit a few fatcat moguls, like most of you have fooled yourself into thinking.
Vista is stupid to sell there (Score:4, Insightful)
What kind of IDIOT would you have to be to pay for a "genuine" Vista in China when you can buy a "non-genuine" one for a dollar?!
Marketing it in China was a huge waste of money. But whatever, Microsoft has money to burn.
OEM's are MS's saving grace (Score:4, Insightful)
Export licences? (Score:3, Insightful)
Many people don't know, but the US exerts complete juristication and control over exports. I would have thought MS-Vista falls under the "publicly available" software exemption, but this wouldn't cover ITAR rules on munitions (incl encryption).
Piracy is NOT theft (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Things working against them. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not just the rich. The rich are certainly very very rich, but even the middle-class in China has very good buying power. There are many households in China that hire someone part time to do maid work. They don't spend a huge amount of money on housing and they don't invest as much for retirement (although both these things are changing). Costs for western name brand products (gadgets, clothing, fast food, StarBucks, etc.) is more or less the same as what you would find in the West. However, food (groceries and restaurants), domestically produced clothing, and labor are all incredibly cheap. The consequence is that they have a lot of expendable income and purchasing power.
Re:244 Vista users? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Piracy is theft (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, you asked for it, so here we go. Software piracy is not theft. It is copyright infringement, which may or may not be fraud. The purchaser of the software, having agreed to the conditions of the sale, breeches his/her contract when he/she copies that software and gives it away. As such, most cases of non-commercial software piracy should remain civil matters between the buyer and seller of the software. It is only when the pirate sells the illegitimate software as legitimate software, or otherwise commits piracy for profit should criminal charges come into play.
That is why software piracy is not theft, and should not be a crime. As for piracy being unethical, I can see real world cases where it perfectly ethical. If you buy a software product, and your disc breaks and the company will not supply a replacement, I would not find it immoral to supply you with a copy of mine. But when we start creating bullshit words like "intellectual property" so that we can make software piracy look more like theft or that only pirates would ever need to circumvent a protection device, is where we start to point the ethic finger back at the software industry and tell them to look in the mirror for a change.
Re:244 Vista users? (Score:4, Insightful)
I know ONE vista user, and she just bought a new laptop, with vista onboard.
The only big issue thus far, other than moving menus changing age old commands like search and replace with search and mark IIRC, is the lack of all in one printer drivers. For example the hp 3055 will print, but the software suite won't install.
She presently considers downgrading to XP to be a little extreme, as it's her belief that the world is going vista and she will be SOL with XP. You or I could just plop in the system restore discs, but this is a complaint from an average user. Also, as we are talking dual core CPUs, one has to get XP-pro or tablet/mediacenter edition. Costs too damned much, or too damned hard to find.
Aside from that, there are people who like the new flashy graphics. Even I somewhat like the new alt-tab program switcher where there is a carousel of screens which actually display what each window is presently displaying. But due to CPU use I wouldn't use it.
Re:From as Bad as Piracy is in China (Score:5, Insightful)
a) Nobody really cares to buy your product
b) Your products are far over priced
c) Most everyone is successfully pirating your product, therefor please justify the burden of product activation (including such features as limited hardware changes) you place on your legitimate, paying customers?
Re:Commie Chinese only need ONE chinese sale (Score:5, Insightful)
That is why no sane economist ever uses averages. They use median income.
If Bill Gates walks into a bar full of out-of-work drunk bums, the "average" income in that bar is suddenly into tens of millions.
A very similar scenario is playing in China where a tiny fraction of the population accounts for nearly all of the income from the economic boom.
Re:China: open source paradise (Score:3, Insightful)
Face it, MS treats the majority of its customers like shitty thieves. Even the most brainwashed employee with stock options knows this. It isn't even about quality, its about disrespect shown to customers.
It's not just piracy (Score:4, Insightful)
You could say it was due to pirating if their projected sales are down by 1-5%, you can't say it if you didn't sell ANYTHING AT ALL. Let's be serious, 250 copies is not really a pirating problem (especially with the draconian DRM/WGA and the buggy/infected patches), it's a resale problem, people don't want your product, not even Chinese Americans that adore Microsoft or first adopters that want the latest and greatest. People don't even want it when they BUY a computer and get Vista for FREE (Vista OEM price = XP OEM price) and don't tell me that a country with over a billion people didn't buy more than 250 computers the last 2 weeks, even though a lot of people are poorer than their westerner counterparts, there are a bunch of companies, a bunch of gadget freaks (more than the US I think) as well as a bunch of filthy rich (richer than you and me). China is not the 3rd world country, the west wants us to believe. Sure it's a poorer country, more mining accidents and their government sucks, but it may be a 2nd world (like us during and right after the industrial revolution or the world wars), but I wouldn't call it 3rd world (as in massive amounts of people dying of malnutrition and no hospitals or massive internal wars).
+1 You beat me to it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cut with the "economy" illusion already (Score:3, Insightful)
in the extreme poor level, it fails. no enterpreurship there.
in the extreme rich level, it goes way out of balance. it was said to me before in college that all the stuff in the world that can be bought/valued by money couldnt meet the total value funds in swiss banks. hence, that money there was money without the possibility of buying something physical.
the problem is, investment is not forced. major capital sets up monopolies, new companies, buys out competition, passes laws and gets more and more rich, the amount of funds in swiss banks go up, yet there is hunger in third world and small businesses in modern countries struggle.
capitalism works because it is applicable in small and medium business level. these two groups handle all the load of the system.
if the funds that piled up were forced to be invested with a percentage, than we would see real economic expansion and mega capitals' presence would be justifiable.
unfortunately i cant outright gather numbers about this idea. this is something i been thinking about for a short time now.
Re:Commie Chinese only need ONE chinese sale (Score:3, Insightful)
I must point out that "average income" is never reliably representative of any population in any country. It takes only one multi-billionaire to render the whole metric useless. That is why "average income" is a darling of various economic propagandists rather then those who try to figure out the economy seriously. That is of course why "average income" is very frequently and breathlessly being talked about by the brainless press which is probably the very reason the GP is so upset with me for daring to go against the "wisdom" Mr. Murdoch's employees.
Which of course makes no sense whatsoever. Why use a deeply flawed metric of "average income" at all, if it is only good when it reasonably aproximates the real metric of "median income"? Why not simply use the median?
Re:REAL REASON: Pirates are helping MS seed Vista. (Score:5, Insightful)
Get you hooked on the cheap/free and then put the price up.
The cheap is edu copies etc, the free is the piracy. But eventually, as you say, the WGA starts to kick in and suddenly your OS starts dropping functionality. When faced with operating system cold turkey what can you do?
It's very clever...
Re:China: open source paradise (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd better wake-up because no big country can survive selling (ok, renting) intelctual property. No one.
If you didn't notice yet, China has copyright laws because THEIR gorvernment choosed to have. And they choosed to have IP because they think it would benefit THEMSELVES. If it somehow stop benefiting themselves (like it becoming huge imports, but very small exports), chinese governemnt can simply not enforce IP anymore, or enforce it in a more benefical way (like only recognizing their people's IP).
Now, you'd better sell some real goods if you want to keep being a partner at international trade. Or produce valuable IP, like useful patents, so you can buy some time.
Re:REAL REASON: Pirates are helping MS seed Vista. (Score:4, Insightful)
And so it shall be done!!!!
Poof! http://nwn.bioware.com/downloads/linuxclient.html [bioware.com]
Re:Commie Chinese only need ONE chinese sale (Score:3, Insightful)
The misunderstanding that is occurring here is that some people are using 'average income' to mean 'the income of the average person' rather than 'the average income of all the people.' It's a common linguistic sloppiness, and needs no justification other than, "I was being linguistically sloppy."
No one can argue that mean income is a more useful metric than median income for discussing how many of X product will sell of product that's intended to be purchased by individuals. Yet for some reason people have tried...
How to force Vista upgrades (Score:1, Insightful)
OEM Sales:
* Heavy penalti^H incentives for OEMs who are selling "too many" copies of the "outdated" OS.
* Stop certifying drivers for "oudated" OSes. This won't do as much, but it will cause those "scary" boxes warning that the drivers aren't signed and might be harmful.
Business Sales:
* Develop new incompatibilit^H features for MS Office and business-centric applications. The idea being to ensure that you need MS Office to exchange office documents with anyone.
* Backups are going to all but require MSs' new backup servers in business-targeted versions of Vista if you want to use Vista's TPM-based encryption. Watch for them to push it as a SO / HIPAA best-practice or requirement soon, as well as the equivalent laws in other countries.
* Drop support when the EOL the older products. Governments and others with more leverage may have more inertia, but unless they move to non-MS controlled document formats, they'll get people to complain that the governments are being "luddites" for not upgrading when other things, like the office formats, become a barrier.
Home Users:
* Aggressively push the Vista-only DX10 onto game makers, capturing the gamer crowd.
* Make sure that no other OS can (legally) play HD media (Blu-Ray & HD-DVD) in as many jurisdictions as possible.
* Tout their new parental controls as a substitute for parenting. They'll probably also push this on educational facilities, trying to mandate that such controls be used in schools, etc.
I'm sure I missed more than a few things, but that's the strategy I see them using, at least in broad strokes. I bet they have ideas more detailed than this, but we probably won't see them unless there's another Comes v. Microsoft where the litigants are bright enough to put all the otherwise expensive-to-access public documents in the case online, no doubt helping effect a settlement. Of course, you can still (legally!) pick up a free copy of them on The Pirate Bay of all places
DISCLAIMER: I have little connection to Microsoft or its competitors save that I've used their products and that I once was a member of the class (i.e. a nobody) in one of the older anti-trust suits against Microsoft. I prepared an objection to the settlement on the grounds that it was beneficial to Microsoft and did nothing to redress continuing harms, but I did not manage to file it with the court in time.