Microsoft Considers Pulling Out of China 443
icefaerie writes to let us know that a senior executive for Microsoft has said the firm could pull out of non-democratic countries such as China. From the article: "Fred Tipson, senior policy counsel for the computer giant, said concerns over the repressive regime might force it to reconsider its business in China. 'Things are getting bad... and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there,' he told a conference in Athens."
takes one to know one... (Score:2, Interesting)
If Microsoft moves by itself, it opens up a huge consumer market to alternatives like Linux on the desktop and solidifies Google as a market leader in the webspace. People may argue that this is good (more Linux adoption etc) but is this s logical price?
Seems to me as though this is more talk to see what others reaction will be. I can't see Microsoft pulling out of such a huge market leaving it open to others with different principles.
PR Stunt (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect they are just trying to get some good press...
Who is repressive? (Score:2, Interesting)
About Peace:
When I read the [1], I thought that the US is the repressive state. After invading in so many countries (3 in 5 years!) it seems to my that it is the most aggressive nation ever. Causing more than 650.000 fatalities in a war just for oil, it is something that even Hitler or Roman emperors haven't done. Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, admitted Bush. Terrorism threat has increased, according to CIA. US had more fatalities in Iraq war rather in twin towers. For what? Did you really believe that Saddam could nuke the US? He couldn't even bomb troops sieging Baghdad. Were he able to create big terrorist acts like what Al Quaeda does? Oh, come on, he had no transactions with extremists and much much more terrorist activity is watched in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia than in any other country.
About Freedom of Speech:
Yeah, that's the most stupid thing I ever heard. Especially after 11/9 civil liberties are literally gone. No, it's not only what I've seen on "Fahrenheit 9/11".
About criminalization of bloggers:
I know that China runs after bloggers, but what happened here in Greece, it was unprecedent. A web directory maintainer was arrester [2] for LINKING to a blog bashing a nationalist tele-evangelist [3], who btw support that us greeks have come from space, were spread throughout the world, we made pyramids, and with the aid of Russia will conquer the world and restore the Bizantine Empire. Ah, also that centaurs have existed. Oh, I forgot that a bookstore owner has been arrested for selling a BANNED book of Mimis Androulakis that was considered offensive to church. Also books of hime were burned in public in Thessaloniki by local orthodox believers. Does this remind you of Medieval Times or to Nazi Germany? I also remember that US citizens referring through a link (but not by plain text) to mp3 sites were prosecuted, at a court win of RIAA.
In no other country a referrer to a censored book or site was arrested -- even in China (which btw, is far from being considered communist, time has passed sine Mao was in power), blogs are banned or even bloggers are arrested. But no site owner referring to them was punished. Are we really a democratic nation?
Microsoft just said that to blind people that accused it for cooperating with the Chinese Government for filtering the web. Try to be objective... I know that this is difficult. When you in US were watching your missiles hitting Belgrad and shouted out WOWs, we were seeing human parts of babies thrown apart. I personally cannot forget one video transmitted by the greek public channel NET showing a hand of a baby lying to the scene of bombardment of a train in Yugoslavia. Did you see such images or you just enjoy Rambo killing thousands of evil enemies defending freedom fighters (=afgans, ironically).
[1] http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaystor
[2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/30/greek_blo
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimosthenis_Liakopou
The real reason (Score:4, Interesting)
If they say they will pull out, it is more that they are going to put pressure on the Chinese (and other governments) to crack down on piracy. If the governments think that they will be unable to easily get what they want from Microsoft, maybe they will crack down on the pirates.
Personally I hope it backfires and China ends up with 100,000,000 computers running Linux. I wonder how that would affect the perceived "market share" held by Microsoft. And think of all the applications that would be made available on Linux. Sweet!