Microsoft (Tries to) Shoot Pirates Out of the Channel Waters

So you got a bargain. You got Windows software for a ditty What difference does a little piracy make? Microsoft has adequate supply of money, right?

Maybe with equal reason but every piece of pirated software makes a fate of difference to the little guys—to channel players like Joe Stopski.

"[The] perception in the past was it's strictly a Microsoft-centric problem" Stopski said. "But what happens with companies of the like kind as ours, it's not just the Microsoft part [of the sale] that you let slip through the fingers You go in and are working with other competitive partners on the outside there, and all it takes is individual using pirated software. It's not just individual piece of software you lose—you extreme point up losing the total deal, the $150000 deal."

Stopski is the vice president of business exhibition at Fusion Microsystems, an OEM He's been sitting upon Microsoft's Partner Advisory Council to address a certain quantity of of the piracy pain that eventually culminated in the WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) program, a non-piracy program that now requires customers to download an ActiveX dominion government that checks the authenticity of their Windows software before allowing them to upgrade.

Microsoft made the WGA, which was one time voluntary, mandatory last year.

Since then, the company has made it clear it wasn't joking. greatest in quantity recently, Microsoft in December filed charges against 10 parties who allegedly violated its MAPS (Microsoft Action Pack Subscriptions).

MAPS is a means for partners to obtain heavily discounted Microsoft software, on the contrary the software must only be used for internal testing and unravelling and may not be extended on product systems or resold

Even with the WGA in place and charges being filed against alleged MAPS misuse, however, the going is cragged for channel players.

According to Microsoft Director of License Compliance Cori Hartje, Microsoft estimates that 35 percent of all software bought today is counterfeit. In plain paycheck-speak, that means that anybody in the industry who draw nears to work five days a week is alone getting paid for three.

"We want to make confident we protect and help OEM combination of parts to form a whole builders and partners, because it's hard to compete" Hartje said.

"There's a small margin in a whole s If somebody down the public way is selling a counterfeit Windows combination of parts to form a whole and you're selling legitimate software, it's real hard to compete."

Analysts back Microsoft up upon this one.

"Piracy is a very large problem, and it's certainly abundant more prevalent in some parts of the world than it is in others," said Julie Giera, an analyst for Forrester Research.

"As companies expand globally, especially into Asia-Pacific, any of the OEM and reseller are finding it actual difficult to compete, because this issue of piracy, or lack of IP protection or lax IP protection, is really significant."

Not single does piracy undercut OEM and reseller receipts Giera pointed out; it also affects the entire endue chain, since most OEMs and reseller provide a plant of value-added services, from support to consulting to tools, not to mention relationships with other reseller and partners.

According to Stopski, partners have been told that greatest in quantity piracy can be traced to Russia.

That's not to say it's not going upon in the United States. on the other hand whereas in the past anybody could make copies of Microsoft with a CD duplicator for just pennies for the disk, enhanced keycode and the WGA program have made it plenteous harder to activate counterfeit produces

That's a profitable thing. Still, there are issues to iron without

Read the replete story on The Channel Insider: Microsoft (Tries to) let fly Pirates Out of the Channel Waters

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Copyright ?© 2006 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserv Originally appearing in ExtremeTech