So why not get them the money?

Posted Mar 6, 2013 8:57 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: So why not get them the money? by mjg59
Parent article: Loading keys from Microsoft PE binaries

Also it's not as if piracy was keeping Microsoft up at night. People have been stealing Microsoft software for nearly 40 years and the company is still doing great. Bill Gates is still #2 on the Forbes list, so there doesn't seem to be an obvious problem.

Microsoft is doing little things here and there to make life harder for pirates (think »activation«), but actually getting rid of piracy altogether isn't that high up on their agenda. If they wanted to, they could certainly stamp out piracy nearly completely but (a) this would also inconvenience legitimate users, in particular »enterprise« users, which would be counterproductive – these users might get silly ideas like looking at operating systems that make for less hassle, such as Linux –, and (b) a certain level of piracy ensures that anybody who wants Windows badly enough will be able to get it, which is way better than encouraging them to look at icky free alternatives like Linux.