Driven by a firm desire to promote genuine software usage, Microsoft has taken the last resort of penalizing partners from the channel community who indulge in pirated software selling. Brian J Campbell shared that this tough stand would continue

Microsoft has engaged itself in a campaign against software piracy. Broadly, what are the market segments that the company is targeting for the campaign?
This is a global campaign that we have against software piracy and we are trying our best to educate our customers and partners in terms of promoting usage of genuine software. As part of this campaign, we are focusing on the mid-market and small business segments.

We are also looking at the consumer segment and are already trying our best to educate customers on this front. We believe that educating a customer towards software piracy will play a big role in terms of establishing the usage of genuine software.

We are trying to provide information about the value attached with buying genuine software and consequently what a customer is losing while buying a pirated version.

Brian J Campbell Director-Genuine Software Initiative Microsoft Corporation India

What is driving piracy in India and how are you gearing up to tackle these issues?
Piracy is more of a mindset issue. Customers still think that they are buying hardware with which the software comes free. However, this mindset is changing and we believe that moving forward more customers will go for genuine software.

We firmly believe that availability of genuine software is a big issue and we are already geared up to provide genuine software where it is required. We have an initiative called 'Dial-a-software-partner' where a customer can call up select Microsoft partners and get genuine software easily. At present we have covered nine big cities with the help of 11 such partners. Moving forward we will be increasing our focus in this direction.

We are also providing certain feature sets with our software that will ensure our customers get 'genuine software' usage message on time. For instance, we are providing the feature of activation confirmation and giving 120 days of grace period to our customers. After this time, the operating system will automatically work on safe mode. We believe that this will encourage consumers to start using genuine software.

As part of its campaign against software piracy, Microsoft has targeted certain software resellers and has filed cases against them. But resellers feel this is not going to stop piracy at all . Comment.
Even though we have taken action against certain resellers, I must tell you that we have done so only after getting proof against them. However, we are certainly not against the channel community and most of these cases have been settled 'out of court' .

We also have to remember that piracy probably will never go away. This means that we will always have places like Nehru Place in Delhi, Lamington
Road in Mumbai or CTC in Secunderabad where pirated software are available.

As part of this campaign we want to go after the source of piracy and try and educate our set of customers in order to buy genuine software. On the other hand, we firmly believe that a day will come when people will demand genuine software. This is what we want.

There are other companies like Adobe, Autodesk etc which are a part of BSA or Nasscom and are engaged in this anti-piracy campaign. Over the past many months, Microsoft has invested a lot of time and effort in terms of identifying and subsequently punishing software pirates. Why has Microsoft gone ahead solo to put a tab on software piracy?
I cannot comment on what other companies are doing on piracy. But I am sure that there are companies which have acted in a much more severe manner against software piracy than we have. Having said this, we continue to work closely with both BSA as well as Nasscom on this issue.

There are instances where really small companies had to completely change their business in order to survive Microsoft's onslaught. They did it because they were unable to pay the hefty penalties imposed by Microsoft. Please comment.

We do take actions against certain channel partners, but we keep that as the last resort. I am certainly not aware of these particular instances, but we do consider the channel community as one we work hand-in-hand with for our success. We cannot work against this community at all. We simply cannot ignore the importance of channel community.

Over the years, Microsoft has enjoyed a lot of patronage from all the segments. Don't you think that this global anti-piracy campaign will make Microsoft unpopular?
I hope this campaign will not make us unpopular. We are in the business of creating value for our partners, customers and the overall ecosystem. A consumer should know that he is getting the right thing. Hence, awareness becomes very important and we are trying to crease as much awareness as possible about the usage of genuine software.

So, we are trying to bring the right values of using genuine software in front of the customers. Microsoft has always placed the right product in the right market at the right price point. This is perhaps one of the biggest contributors for our global success. We have always adjusted to the local needs and our recent pricing policies in India are an example of this.

What kind of impact has this campaign had in India?
There is certainly a very positive impact of this campaign on our business outlook. We received tremendous response to our 'Dial-a-software-partner' program in early January and we have received tremendous response from this. So we have been able to address the issue
of availability with the help of these initiatives.

Moving forward our strategy would be to make sure that we continue to reduce piracy to certain minimum levels.

At present, the piracy level in India is somewhere around 72 percent figure. We want to take our piracy rate down by two to four percent.

If you were able to achieve this, what kind of impact would it have on your topline coming from India?
I cannot share any numbers on this but certainly it will have a big positive impact for us as a company, and even the industry in general will get a lot of empowerment because of this.

ZIA ASKARI

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