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Microsoft (MSFT) Drops Vista Price In China

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Perhaps people from around the world will travel to China to get their new Microsoft (MSFT) Vista operating system. The company has dropped its price for Vista Home Basic to $66.

Research firm IDC estimates that 84% of the software used in China last year was pirated. The Chinese government has mandated that PCs sold in the country have the operating system pre-installed.

All of these move are good ideas, but they are half measures. As the film industry has found, nothing short of tracking down pirates and severely punishing them is likely to change the Chinese practice of stealing intellectual property from other countries.

The issue now is what will Microsoft do if the large majority of Windows used in China continues to bring the company no revenue.

The answer is, the company can’t do a thing.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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