[PLUG-TALK] MS anti-piracy war tactics

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Sat Nov 20 20:10:22 UTC 2010


On Sat, 20 Nov 2010, John Jason Jordan wrote:

> It also said that "an industry trade group" estimated the total cost of
> pirated copies for all software companies at $51.4 billion a year.

   That's probably the price of full retail.

> The same can be said for just about every software company that has gone
> out of business. I used Corel products for a long time, and they were
> wonderful, albeit buggy. Their genius was in the user interface, which was
> a joy. They couldn't code worth a damn, but that isn't what hurt them
> fatally. Nor was piracy a factor. They were finally bought out by a
> private holding company for a song after several years of making one bad
> business decision after another. Remember Corel Linux? CorelDRAW for
> Linux? WordPerfect for Linux? (I still have those in the back of a closet
> somewhere.) Michael Cowpland spent millions developing those products and
> made a negligible amount in sales before pulling the plug on them.

   Don't forget WordPerfect. It started as a product from Satellite Software
international (SSI) in Provo, UT and that's when I first used it. Then it
became WordPerfect Corp. I visited their campus in Provo and it would be the
envy of many colleges. The cafeteria seated 1,500 at one time and the food
was delicious and very reasonably priced. Talk about good entrepreneurs who
didn't know how to keep the company going: they were the poster children.

   Howver, the computer industry is littered with such non-visionaries. IBM's
Thomas Watson who thought the world demand for computers might be 5, Xerox
who invented the microcomputer and WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointing
device) and couldn't make the corporate decision to develop and sell it so
they let Steve Jobs steal those ideas for Apple, what's-his-name from DEC
(the president back then when they were still Digital Electronics Corp) who
also couldn't see past what they were doing. There's hope yet for Microsoft
to follow the same path.

Rich



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