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Microsoft has managed to annoy millions of Chinese, something the U.S. government was unable to do for the last 60 years.
As the single party state of China approaches its 60th anniversary, and as it grows to become interwoven into global society, some cultural cracks and crackpots are beginning to show. Nowhere is this more evident that the intersection of intellectual property and a society robbed of all private property in 1949 when Mao and his minions man-slaughtered their way into power.
As Mao meant to say, progressiveness comes from the barrel of a gun.
Walk the back streets of any Chinese metropolis and your will find knock-off market places, stalls brimming with name brand goods not intentionally made by brand name manufactures. Often assembled in the same factories using secret third-shift workers, these counterfeit products flood the Asian market with China being the well hole of manufactured theft.
Gucci has no idea how popular their handbags really are.
When someone steels your freedom and property for sixty years, theft becomes a legitimized way of life. Hence the Chinese retail underworld that operates completely aboveboard. Take the worst aspects of capitalism and communism, mix in a batter of desperation and you have modern Chinese business ethics, which make American business ethics saintly in contrast.
Enchanted with the Internet (the tool that will eventually bring down the PRC government) China’s wired population greedily consumes PCs and software. Since most of the world’s end-user software runs on Microsoft Windows, inappropriate and entirely illegal copies of XP and Vista are a bountiful as Mao caps once were. Any Beijing street vendor can pull out bogus copies of Windows and let them go for twice the duplication costs, which was nearly nothing. Faced with a full retail price for Windows or a clumsy clone of the same software for a fraction of the price, no semi-starving Chinese person would choose the real thing.
Facing lost sales to 1.3 billion people, Microsoft took action … and the reaction is precious.
Starting with XP, Microsoft launched their “Genuine Advantage” program which provides a genuine advantage only to Microsoft. It enables Microsoft to clobber a computer with illegally copied instances of Windows. Microsoft didn’t actively disable computers until recently, firing something of a digital warning shot over China’s user base.
Chinese digital addicts are pissed. Not in the pleasant, happy, inebriated U.K. use of the word. No, Chinese PC users are pissed in the boiling mad, American redneck mode.
“Why is Microsoft automatically connected with my computer? The computer is mine! Microsoft has no right to control my hardware without my agreement.” This blogger missed the salient point that his hardware is working exactly as it is designed to work when no operating system installed.
A master stroke of anti-genius came when the same fellow said “If the price of genuine software was lower than the fake one, who would buy the fake one?” I can’t even create a joke in response to his absurdly obvious analysis of micro economics. I suspect if this fellow took a long sip of tea and contemplated his own words, the glow of lucidity would lift him into a rapturous high. If not the same vendor who sold him his pirated copy of Windows could likely sell him some low grade hash to complete his intellectual transformation.
A Chinese lawyer opined that Microsoft was the “biggest hacker in China with its intrusion into users’ computer systems without their agreement or any judicial authority,” Now American lawyers are not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, this being evidenced by the ones elected to Congress. Evidentially Chinese lawyers have IQ’s slightly lower than your average fence post. This Shanghai shyster bemoans a lack of agreement to Microsoft disabling their own software without noting that Microsoft never agreed to allow pirated copies of their products to be installed in the first place.
Next, Chinese lawyers will litigate against God for failing to deliver milk and honey per scriptural contract.
To my friends in China I say welcome to capitalism. Free markets are built on trust and enforcement, and theft is not tolerated. If you want to be capitalists on a global scale, you have to play by the rules.
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