You don’t steal what you bash!
On the one hand, I see many people using cracked versions of (amongst others and for instance) Microsoft Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. These people often pride themselves by saying they never bought a software from Microsoft apart from OEM versions. And on the other hand, the very same people spend a lot of energy, saliva and time knocking to (for instance) Microsoft software.
After watching this type of behavior for several years and giving it some thought, I now systematically step against these people and engage discussions based on the following rationale. you can’t steal products from a company and criticize it at the same time. If you criticize these products so harshly, it may well mean you don’t need these products. So why download and crack these?
By stealing a product from a company (be it software or cheese), you actually disfranchise this company to a revenue equaling the price of the product. This revenue would have been partially reinvested in building a better version of the very same product. Those who pay have the right to criticize because they contribute to improving the product. Those who steal have in my opinion no right to criticize the product as having these pirates saying “this product sucks and is getting worse” is a self fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, how do these guys want this product to get any better if the company that manufactures it doesn’t have the revenues to reinvest in building a better product? Where do product teams find the motivation to give their best, take their work the extra mile?
Things get even worse in the very case of software applications. Quite understandably, Pirates hardly register to the software vendor. So, the software vendor don’t get user feedback from these users – meaning not only do software pirates prevent software vendors from cash they would need to reinvest in building a better version fast, but crackers also harm the capability of software vendors to collect accurate market data and work in the right direction. Hence the fact that pirates also harm the user experience of people who actually purchase software in the mid run. Isn’t that sort of behavior called killing 3 birds with 1 shot?
Let’s briefly examine the case of Microsoft now: I don’t know the exact software license piracy rate figures, but I know the French ones (40%) and the Chinese ones (70%). Let’s be optimistic and assume the global license cracking rate to approach the 1/3 waters (and I’m being very optimistic). So, Microsoft making US$44 billion in revenues from selling software licenses representing 2/3 of the revenues it should have generated means true Microsoft’s sales (net of piracy) should reach 66 billion US dollars.
As structural costs are already taken into account and the marginal software distribution cost is negligible, and providing that the utopia of seeing piracy suddenly stop came true, Microsoft would have JUST THIS YEAR 22 billion US dollars of additional free cash flows to work on improving its applications (recruiting more developers, investing in better CRM, support and feedback collection system, etc.) and working on building better communication channels with its software users. 22 billion USD in one single year, that’s a massive amount you crackers steal from we users who actually pay for the software we use (and not necessarily always like, I acknowledge). Because it’s 3:30am (still with a pile of stuff to do for tomorrow) and I don’t have accurate numbers to crunch, I’m not delving into the all times cost-of-piracy-at-Microsoft calculation, but I guess it easily tops 100 billion USD. This sum of money could also be used to offer software rental services in Africa for instance, to help democratize the use of computers. But there’s no way you would spend the slightest penny on a product, like a software app, that is not material – am I right?
I hope I’m making my point: if you do crack software (like something like one third of the world computer literate population does), then criticizing the software itself and its vendor is, in the eyes of many and hopefully yours now, at an ethical border line.
And yet, the law hasn’t been mentioned in any way in this demonstration…
2 Comments 
