Why Microsoft could drop the ball on software piracy

Search for "cheap microsoft office" on Bing, the search engine of Microsoft and you will be surprised to see what is displayed. Apart from the usual announcements and search results from Microsoft, many websites seek to get your attention.

An advertisement pointing to Getmsoffice.com also offers a direct download button to Softwarekeep and is the largest above the fold. The second organic result on the SERP (search engine results page) is for a website called softwareonlinedeal.com, the fourth is softwareproworld.com.

(Image credit: Future / Desire Athow)

The common denominator of these sites? They all sell Microsoft Office cheaply, absurdly cheap. Softwareonlinedeal sells Microsoft Office Professional 2019 for $ 189.99 for a download and product key. Microsoft sells it online for $ 439.99, a discount of almost 57%.

But there is even better (or worse, depending on your position). TechRadar has been able to find a working copy of Microsoft Office 365 for five devices and 5 TB for Mac and PC for a total of £ 1.35 (about $ 1.68). In comparison, Office 365 Home with six users and 1TB storage costs $ 99.99 per year; it is a reduction of almost 100% considering the fact that you benefit from a subscription for life; one that does not expire.

At the time of writing, the vendor reported having sold more than 50,000 keys, but several accounts were likely attributable to it (the vendor we found had only about 540 keys, with less than 100 positive comments recorded) .

You have a login, a pbadword and a login URL via the eBay messaging system. We were able to log in and download Microsoft Office from what appeared to be the real backend of an Office 365 Education account (Office 365 A1 Plus for Students).

Office is not the only Microsoft product to benefit from incredible discounts. We bought a Windows 10 Professional license key at £ 1; you get a Google Drive key and link to download the ISO coupon. We did not download or install it, but since the vendor received many positive feedbacks, it is likely that this experience would have been positive. You can even contact the seller by WhatsApp.

(Image credit: Future / Desire Athow)

At the time of writing, Ebay contains hundreds of extremely inexpensive Microsoft Office listings and Windows 10 licenses, openly available for sale. Clearly, this is a piracy on an industrial scale that costs Microsoft tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Microsoft's position on this is clear. "With the exception of product key cards distributed with certificates of authenticity (COA), Microsoft does not distribute product keys as stand-alone products. If you see a list on an auction site, an online clbadified ad or other online ad product key, it means that these keys are probably stolen or counterfeit, "says the corresponding Microsoft page.

When we shared our findings with the Microsoft public relations team, the answer was: "We encourage customers to purchase genuine versions of Windows and Office 365 from Microsoft or from Microsoft. One of our trusted partners. According to industry experts, the use of pirated software, including non-genuine Windows and Office 365, increases the risk of malicious programs, public disclosure of fraudulent personal information and increases the risk of poor performance or performance. malfunctions of features. "

This is a less aggressive tone compared to the Microsoft yesterday that spoke of the billions of dollars potential revenue lost to piracy. What has changed then?

A new philosophy

Microsoft matured after experiencing some of its most difficult years during the Ballmer years. Under the aegis of Satya Nadella, the company regained its raison d'être after a mid-life crisis and turned out to be a very different, more accommodating society. Integration of a Linux kernel in Windows 10 or embrace Android as if his own operating system would have been considered a heresy only a few years ago, and yet that has happened.

Under this new CEO, hell froze several times as the company's share price went from $ 37.50 to nearly $ 138, becoming the only company with a trillion dollars market share and, perhaps more importantly, unaffected by the privacy fiasco. no problem for the GAFA quartet (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon).

Ironically, Microsoft is where it is because it has not found a real alternative to Google's Android and has had to double its activities with businesses, the public sector and businesses. Not having to make money selling your user data has been a powerful catalyst and a force for change for Microsoft. For the better, with hindsight.

Nadella's promotion – he was Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise Group – also meant that turning Microsoft into a service-oriented company would only accelerate.

(Image credit: Shutterstock.com)

With commerce and the cloud as top priorities, one could argue that software piracy by consumers was considered of lesser importance. We can not and will probably never be able to prove it, however, our conclusions are hard to ignore.

Software piracy, as a theme, is rarely mentioned on the Microsoft website. The last major piece on counterfeit software and fraudulent subscriptions dates from April 2018 and mentions the tens of thousands of people who report such practices to Microsoft each year.

Important anti-piracy the documents no longer exist; Microsoft has abandoned initiatives such as Play caution, a global initiative launched in 2013 to raise awareness of software piracy issues, closed press room on intellectual property crimes.

This falls into ridicule, although once you try to report fake software on the Microsoft website. The de facto page is that one which appears in the 2018 blog article mentioned above. A quick look at what you can report leaves the astute observer undoubtedly as to the age of this page.

(Image credit: Future / Desire Athow)

The latest operating system mentioned is Windows 8, which is two generations old. Same for Windows Server and Office (as of 2012). No mention of Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Office 2016 and other newer products. This is perhaps the most striking example of Microsoft's seemingly neglected approach to software piracy. But is everything bad?

When the software is no longer software

Microsoft has built its success on locally stored code lines, but its future is based on secure lines of code in data centers. The concept of software piracy is quickly becoming as obsolete as that of using software without connectivity. Microsoft is not the only one to do it. Software as a service or subscriptions fuel the growth of Adobe, Bitdefender and their ilk.

Perpetual software licenses are likely to be an anachronism within a decade, and perhaps no evidence is more powerful than the endangered search volume for the word "crackz" which refers to software used to hack a computer. software protected by copyright. In 2014, a decade after the mandate reached its peak, it had virtually disappeared. SaaS is a subscription and you can not solve this problem.

There is, however, a huge gap, especially with Microsoft software. Windows 10 licenses – essentially an alphanumeric character string – are widely available, most often because companies have purchased computers that are then decommissioned (although there are a myriad of other reasons – MSDN / OEM / Volume Key).

Sooner or later, they will all have to contact the Microsoft servers to activate them and obtain security features or updates. The same goes for Microsoft Office 365; those for sale are often free educational licenses in the United Kingdom and the United States if you are a student or have children in school. Vendors who sell these licenses openly flout the terms and conditions to the detriment of legitimate Microsoft resellers.

Perversely, this creates confusion among users: a post on the popular forum offers in the UK, hotukdeals, sum it up perfectly. "I buy a Windows key at the biggest store on the net, I pay it with my PayPal account connected to my credit card, I put it on my computer connected to my internet and my IP address, then I'll buy it. use this internet connection. enable this key on Microsoft servers. If it's active, then it's legal. " This comment has been voted on several times, which means that most readers agree with it.

So why is Microsoft not fighting piracy like before?

An explanation could be that Google, with ChromeOS and G Suite, is a small but growing threat in a world where mainstream technology often permeates businesses. Pirated content can be viewed as a proxy or buffer, a means of doing guerrilla marketing to prevent others (libreoffice someone?) to win hearts and minds

Another way of saying this is that an additional Office 365 user usually means a less G Suite. For Windows 10, encouraging users to switch from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 (which still accounts for about 40% of the global desktop market) can only help.

This brings us to this conclusion: we have to see that Microsoft is growing in absolute numbers because it helps the business case (and the course of action).

In 2015, Microsoft revealed its ambitions to achieve the noble goal of a billion users of Windows 10 by 2018. In 12 months, it was clear that this would never happen. Windows 10 Mobile gone, leaving these users exclusively from mobile devices (not included Hololens).

And although Windows 10 was not mentioned at all when the last three results were released, revenues generated by Windows OEM increased every quarter. There were 600 million MAU (monthly active users) in November 2017, 700 million in June 2018 and 800 million in March 2019. The end of the Windows 7 support period scheduled for January 2020 is likely to be a catalyst for businesses and consumers.

A special type of freemium

Microsoft's attitude towards piracy can therefore be interpreted as tacit recognition of its usefulness as a marketing tool. Too much noise could be bad publicity and Microsoft could still start turning the screws if Windows or Office revenues started to go down.

This could push counterfeit software users into the arms of Google, which is not desirable in the short term. Looking at our crystal ball, we can see that "Windows 365" and "Microsoft 365" will work almost entirely as subscriptions and that, like Adobe with Photoshop, there will be a time when you can not buy or use Microsoft Product under perpetual license and without web connectivity.

Counterfeit users of Windows 10 and Office 365 who have lost access to their services have been reported. It therefore appears that random rather than systematic anti-piracy measures are taken from time to time. After all, even in 2007, he was using the data provided by his Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) software Software to help eliminate a counterfeit network in China.