I love to watch Jamie Love speak because of fluidity with which he weaves the latest joke or theory into his discourse as though its established fact. There’s a claim that’s been brewing that Microsoft has been “letting piracy pass” in the past in order to gain market share and now that everyone is “locked in” they are moving in to collect their reward.
First of all, this kind of “lock in” is a joke. The theory goes that once you’ve created a bunch of documents in a proprietary format, you won’t be able to change tools. So how does this help with Windows that doesn’t really have any file formats?
Second, all of the office productivity suites are able to read each others file formats. To state otherwise is to search out some esoteric exception that proves the rule.
Finally, it would come as a great surprise to organizations like SIIA (formally SPA) and the BSA that Microsoft or anyone else has been giving a “pass” to piracy until recently. The entire raison d’etre for these orgs has been the pursuit of software pirates around the world for many many years.
Perhaps most important, what about all of the small businesses who have been losing revenues (the software industry loses twice as much as the recording industry to piracy by the way) but who have not achieved this “lock in” or market share. Should they just grin and bear it as they watch their software pirated around the globe? Pretty broad brush Mr. Love!