Microsoft has miles to go in trackling software piracy
Microsoft said that it may take decades to tackle software piracy in large emerging economies despite some recent progress and called on Asian governments to invest more in policing the practice.
Craig Mundie, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer said that they were realistic in recognising that they had to work diligently over periods, that were really a decade or two, to make real progress in a number of those environments.
Mundie, one of the two successors to Microsoft founder Bill Gates next year, said progress had been made in countries like China and Vietnam in recent years to tackle software piracy, which cost the company billions of doller each year. However, he said more needed to be done to police the problem.
Mundie said that most of the Asian counties have the laws, some have regulations they probably need tuning up, but the biggest weakness is that very few of them have made the necessary investments on the enforcement side.
Microsoft has made progress in China where the piracy rate has dropped to 82% this year from 94% four years ago, he said. The piracy rate is a measure of the level of pirated software in the country. China president Hu Jintao last year pledged to crack down on software piracy.
He said microsoft expected to continue to grow its workforce and research and development capability in countries outside its dominant US market, such as India. The software company has been expanding beyond its Windows and office software businesses, saying Web services and customer devices are key to the company’s future.
