Technology

Vista Bombs in China - 244 Copies Sold!

by Leonard Brody | April 19, 2007 at 04:32 pm | 913 views | 1 comment | 0 recommendations

Half of American Business PCs Can't Run Vista

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Well, the marketing geniuses at Microsoft have really conquered this whole 'new world' thing. I can just see Ballmer sitting in his boardroom yelling, "Asia is ours!" and then doing the monkey dance. Nice work gents.

Chasing after software pirates in the US is one thing, but China's a whole other ballgame. Pirated copies of Windows Vista are widely available throughout the country, for as little as $1.

So while Microsoft spent millions to promote Vista in China, the company apparently sold just 244 copies of the operating system during the first two weeks it was legally available in China.

Microsoft has spent a lot of time and effort making it as difficult as possible for pirates to activate copies of Windows Vista. But just last week Microsoft admitted that there were two working activation cracks that the company has no plans to fix. It's not clear what method Chinese users are using to activate pirated copies of Vista.

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castcrus

at 21:34 on April 20th, 2007

Actually the price of pirated software and movies is RMB 4 per DVD in China, that is about 60 cents of US dollar.

The Home Basic version of Vista is sold RMB 1499, it's the same with average price of pcs(not including monitor), and it's still a little more than everage wages per month in Shanghai, which is the most prosperous.