Comment by ls65536 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ls65536 | Hacker News Reader

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> Indeed, in some cases, people bought software they pirated in college because by that point, they were used to it.

This reminds me of some old reasoning for why many software vendors would often tacitly go easy on those copying their software, as it was often seen as a wide pipe to eventual revenue down the road. Rather than letting those (potential) eventual customers go to the competition early on (often much less expensive to purchase, or perhaps even "free"), they would get comfortable with the proprietary features of a certain piece of software and be "locked in" that way. Of course, this practice would be unlikely to ever be officially acknowledged by the software vendor(s), but the people who understood this made "business sense" knew what they were doing.

Some of this was pretty explicit and pretty well documented. In the late nineties, Microsoft strategically encouraged piracy in many developing countries, to develop lock-in. This wasn't just comfort; once a country has infrastructure built around Windows, from scripts, to data formats, to workforce skills, to everything else, it's almost impossible to switch off. At the time, the plan was to crack down once countries developed a little bit and could afford to pay.

Indeed, many years later, Microsoft then cracked down on piracy when countries reached middle income. I'm not familiar with Microsoft to know if that was intentional follow-though on the original strategy, or coincidental. By the time the crackdown happened, Microsoft was a very different (and much less strategic) company with different people. In either case, they came out way ahead for it.

> Speaking at University of Washington, Bill Gates said: “Although 3 million computers get sold each year in China, people don’t pay for our software. Someday they will, though, and as long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

Not just vendor lock but also stifling competition by letting the "free" version set a price ceiling for alternatives.

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