Microsoft have gone on the offensive against pirates.

• in the UK, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) is offering a £20,000 reward to anyone who informs on their employer using illegal or unlicensed software
• Microsoft is adding hooks into MS-Office to detect if the software is legal or not
• Microsoft has just acquired a company who specialise in tracking what software is installed on PCs

I am of course entirely in favour of this.

However, a poll has suggested that 86% of users would prefer to migrate to OpenOffice.org rather than pay for MS-Office 2003. If as Microsoft claims, 35% of the software in use in the world is pirated, then this is a huge marketing opportunity for OpenOffice.org.

Add this to market resistance to an unwelcome upgrade to MS-Office 2007, and you see a trend emerging…

This entry was posted on Friday, April 28th, 2006 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Open-source, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.