Anybody who knows the consumer base in Sri Lanka are aware that the general computer buyer and user has very little funds, and hence tend to spend on getting the best PC they can buy with the limited cash they have in the pocket. With IT now moving towards the rural areas, and internet access growing at a very rapid rate with the introduction of mobile 3G and wimax, computer owners have grown in remote areas as well. These people have even more limited budgets an they tend to opt for "used computers", these used computers seem to be computers that are dumped by corporate firms in Japan/Singapore after they have reached their end of the lifecycles (3-5 years).
Hence purchasing a computer alone is a major financial investment, and if they were to buy license software based on current sales it would mean they can never afford a computer! Hence you see the use of "pirated" software being installed in almost 100% of computers in the past among non-corporate customers, and only in recent time has this improved mainly due to the sales in laptops which are sold with a bundled OS.
However the enforcement of software piracy laws in recent times has seen heavy fines and raids by the law enforcement authorities on stores selling pirate software. However the raids have been selective indicating the enforcement of the law is motivated by specific software vendors, mainly Microsoft and Adobe. Not a big surprise since the most heavily installed software in the local market originate from Microsoft and Adobe!
With the access to pirate software becoming hard from stores, the motivation to buy a license seems to be in everyone's minds but when you compare the licensing prices for even a basic OS, you see that you get the same product for almost half or quarter of the prices online in the US, a country where people have much larger incomes. Though Microsoft has put out a low cost option by making available a the Vista Start Kit (and XP starter kit prior to that), the limitations of this version has made this a rather unsuccessful solution, and indicates that no proper thought process has been given by the Microsoft sales group :(. Surprising considering that you find lower licensing costs in other Asia Pacific countries, even countries that have much better economies than Sri Lanka. So to me this seems to be failing from a country sales point rather than Microsoft in general.
The disaster of this decision is that more and more are now opting to download pirated OS's from hosting sites, and these installations are regularly embedded with trojans and viruses which make the OS not safe and stable. Hence users who then use this version tend to associate these problems with the quality of software produced by Microsoft!! Further with Microsoft updates checking for common licenses that are pirated (usually OEM licenses by HP and Dell being the most available), most users resort to disabling the Windows update function, which means they don't get the benefit of the fixes to security and reliability (And performance), and again this results in a bad image among users on Microsoft software.
So much so, the impetus to use Open Source alternatives has increased, and with the heavy support by government institutions, the next generation of users may not want to use Microsoft software.
One market that has understood the Sri Lankan market is the AntiVirus manufacturers, who now sell the software at prices that the local consumer can afford (around 1000-1500 SL rupees = 10-15US$). More and more users now actually buy licensed AntiVirus software, even when good free solutions exists!
Yet the software giant sales team locally seems blissfully unaware of this, and continues to quote exorbitant licensing rates to consumers for its most popular products the Operating Systems and Office package, and what i see by doing so its making people move to alternatives, and even if they use the pirated versions less trust on the Microsoft software due to the issues in using pirate version mentioned earlier... Microsoft Sales team in SL its time you woke up guys!
The local market is not happy with a Vanilla start kit, give them something better and a price they can afford just like the Anti Virus vendors, say Rs 3000-5000 for Vista Home or Windows 7, and similar for Office 2007. Yes this might be one quarter or even less than the current prices, but imagine where the piracy rates are as much as over 90%, if 30-40% of that were to buy the lower cost license, who would have a fatter wallet, and also all these would be getting Windows and Office updates, so the software would be more reliable as well.
Well that's my first blog on this new site... more to come :)
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