NEWS
Microsoft is to 'up the ante' on tackling business software piracy after its latest figures showed one-third of customers still run counterfeit software.
Microsoft is hailing the success of its 'Keep IT Real' anti-piracy crackdown one year on from its launch, citing a 3.8 per cent drop in the Windows XP piracy rate to 12.9 per cent.
But more than 8,300 pieces of counterfeit software have been found on UK business customer premises since July last year.
Michala Alexander, UK head of Microsoft's anti-piracy unit, admitted illegal software use is still rife among medium-sized businesses - generally those with more than 100 employees but less than 1,000.
She told silicon.com: "We are still seeing a large number of businesses in the mid-market using large amounts of counterfeit software. It is still very much a problem."
Most of the illegal software discovered was high-quality counterfeits, and Alexander said: "We have even seen one case where the customer actually paid more for the counterfeit copy than a genuine copy."
Microsoft does not take legal enforcement action against customers found to be using illegal software, beyond making the customer pay to replace the counterfeit products. Instead, the enforcement action is targeted on the channel and the resellers who are distributing the fake software.
Alexander said: "When we find it in a customer site we will go after the reseller as well. We are fully committed to ridding the channel of pirated copies. We will be upping the ante on enforcement."
In addition to more enforcement action Microsoft will also be keeping a close eye on the counterfeit market for Windows Vista over the next 12 months.
Alexander said: "We will be watching the activation process we have built into Vista closely but we haven't yet seen any counterfeit copies of Vista."
Comments
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1. Graham Coles
So, Vista not selling too well then ...
2. Anthony Hunt
Vista has solved the Piracy problem by being so bad nobody WANTS to copy it.
3. William
For those who blindly yell "MS is bad", "MS is the worst", please read the news how much Microsoft has sold Vista before making such a non-sense judge. It must have a reason why Microsoft can maintain its 90% of OS market. Think before you yell.
4. Nick Cole
How do they really know? Or are they just extrapolating to support an argument for greater controls or intrusion?
In my experience the source disk may be one of only dozens (or hundreds) that is routinely used. If there is a mismatch between the numbers of licences bought and used then that is indicative of perhaps underreporting, but nothing more. And how are users/purchasers really supposed to know whether or not a disk is legitimate when it is invariably bought in good faith.
And how do they know it is businesses? Or again is that an extrapolation from the update validity checking?
And of course Microsoft would try and allege this case wouldn't they?
5. anonymous
To those who blindly yell in favour of Microsoft…
Having used Vista in BETA, RC & Retail flavours I can say with experience that Vista is not (in its current form) any kind of improvement over XP.
It’s unstable, 20-25% slower across the board, very poorly supported in legacy drivers and even the most expensive “editions” offer little in the way of new features. Its interface is trying to imitate the Mac. I for one don’t want a Disney Pixar animation every time a file is copied. What a waste of CPU!
What I wanted to see was a faster more memory efficient version of XP with some genuine new features (not gimmicks). Instead we get a dumbed-down white elephant, trying to be a cash cow and failing.
As a software developer on the Windows platform (I neither have nor want a Mac or Linux, thank you) I expected something better from Microsoft, especially as it is their second attempt at a new OS. They already went back to the drawing board with Longhorn.
Since the Torrent & Warez sites barely list Vista, the non-paying individuals out there share this view. The paying customers also think Vista is less-than-desirable; witness Dell returning to selling a range of XP-installed workstations at the behest of their customers.
Microsoft claim Vista sold 20 million copies in the first month, (over XP’s 17 million) but their figures are for more like a two month period and include upgrade vouchers shipped with XP machines and licences sold to OEM channels. Licence sales to OEM’s are not sales. Since independent figures put US PC sales at 3 million, Microsoft’s claim really begins to unravel. Gartner and IDC forecasts show no significant uptake in PC sales because of Vista.
Those people who I know who ARE using it, have XP installed and dual-boot to run games, Adobe apps., scanners & PDAs, since they don’t work well (or at all) under Vista. And live in hope that the NEXT nVidia driver release will be the one that fixes it all.
Microsoft may have 90% of the OS market currently, but they won’t keep it with Vista unless they fix it. Speed, DRM, security & hardware drivers all need sorting out before I’ll touch it again. See you at SP1.