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Sima Yi
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China Piracy Makes Microsoft Head Nervous
4:58pm Wednesday October 06, 2010
Martin Stanford
Illegal piracy needs to be addressed and intellectual property needs better protection in China, the Microsoft CEO has told students in London.
Steve Ballmer said that piracy in China is twenty times worse than the UK and twelve times worse than in India. That, coupled with the fact that China will soon be the world’s number economy, makes him "nervous". The Microsoft head was speaking to students, academics and the media at the London School of Economics (LSE) where he gave a lecture entitled 'Seizing the Opportunity of the Cloud: the Next Wave of Business Growth'.
Mr Ballmer said that while consumers had embraced the always-on connectivity that is possible with smartphones and similar devices, business had been slower to see the potential. He argued that in the field of science, communities of joined-up computer users will be able to achieve far more than one machine of whatever size can alone.
He called on governments to see the potential for efficiencies through the use of cloud based services - something his company will sell you for a price. And he argued that while there might be some job losses in some areas of IT as a result of better use of automation, there was the possibility of a net increase in jobs with more people designing and managing more services.
Pirate copies of Microsoft software for sale at a market in China
Steve Ballmer praised the UK’s role as home to great innovators, both as app creators and as consumers keen to embrace new technologies. That is one reason why the new Windows 7 phone will have its global launch here, he said. "We know that this is a place where if we get a product right, we'll get a good early reception," he told his audience.
Mr Ballmer admitted Microsoft had been a little slow to the smartphone market, but promised a real wow factor when new handsets become available later in the autumn. The Microsoft CEO choose to ignore questions about the future of the operating system (such as XP and Vista, the mainstay of profit for Microsoft) – and the threat from Google’s, proposed, free, Chrome OS.
He also appeared horrified at the suggestion that Microsoft, like so many tech companies, might, one day, fail. "Very few tech companies have stayed at the top for a long time," he admitted. But he said that Microsoft would, under his leadership thrive, as long "as we continue to innovate and change".
