"Too big to fail"

Plus most of the people I knew are using pirated versions of Microsoft's Windows OS. Because many people here can't afford buying the uber expensive OS. They really lost a lot of money from that.

Maybe you are telling me about switching to other OS?
It's hard to switch since we are experienced Windows users so it's not easy to cope up.

Well Open Office is just good for saving about $250. If all you need is Microsoft Word, then you're set with Open Office.

Microsoft pretty much has you with the OS though. There is Ubuntu. It's a free OS, but it's a little technical for most people and has almost no market share.

I actually think they just take the piracy losses in stride. I assume they get a ton of sales from bundling deals. Individual sales probably don't comprise too much of their income. Plus, companies like Microsoft and Adobe intentionally price their big name products fairly high. That way they get a bunch of guaranteed money from the big businesses without losing too much to the piracy that it will spawn.

The Parakeet said:

Google currently owns Open Office. If they decided to use their ridiculous web presence to advertise it and make it really mainstream...then Microsoft could lose a huge chunk of easy profit.

Click to expand...

Now that sounds awesome. Think Microsoft really needs some competition as the last version, i.e. MS2007 was such an insult to everyone's intelligence. They took something that was really good, i.e. Microsoft 2003 and that everyone had done courses in, and completely changed its interface to that ribbon that everyone had to do a complete new learning curve in. And waste lots of time. And the "new" version still has things that need to be sorted out. Hope Open Office can give them a run for their money.