Publicly, Microsoft’s stance on piracy is clear: “No.” Privately, as we know, it’s a different story. Google “Office 2010” and you’ll get results from Microsoft; do a torrent search and you’ll get something else. Why?

In 2006, Hal Varian, a professor of information management at the University of California at Berkeley, compared Microsoft’s products to street drugs: “The first dose is free. Once you start using a product, you keep using it.”

And Bill Gates said, quite clearly the same year: “Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. ... We want them to steal... They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect...”

That’s exactly the way it happens. Why hasn’t OpenOffice ever really taken off? Well, you get addicted to MS Office (and Windows), and then you want the same thing at work or at school — where, of course, they pay for the licenses.

Also at play here is that MS gets to charge more for their products to offset the so-called “cost of piracy.” (Which isn’t really a cost at all — it’s an opportunity.)

Even if the “addiction” aspect weren’t true, MS would rather allow piracy and make money on a few licensed copies — and thus maintain market share and mind share.

After all, they don’t really lose money if I buy a pirated copy of Windows. It’s something like the music industry saying they lose money when someone downloads a pirated album: I wouldn’t pay for it, and I’m only downloading it because it’s pirated and free.

All of which tells us that software piracy is going to be around for a while. MS isn’t dumb.

Tags : Microsoft, piracy, Bill Gates