[ikuygtyuiouy]

I thought this had always been a MSFT business plan? Given that very few people in china are going to spend a years salary on a full copy of MS Office the alternatives are:

1, They develop their own local software

2, They adopt and localize some open source software

3, They pirate your software making you a defacto standard

Which would you prefer - long term?

[pyre]

They can't say that outright though. They have to pretend to want piracy to end in China, even if that's not the case. They probably know that there's little that will be done to stem the issue, at least at the present time.

[ikuygtyuiouy]

If I were the chinese I wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to say -

"you're right we will introduce the death penalty for software piracy, ban the sale of imported software at below US list price - and we will put 100,000 programmers on a plan to produce OpenOffice for the people"

[moondowner]

Actually, there's a Chinese fork of OpenOffice.org, it's called RedOffice. It also has a pretty good interface!

review: http://www.johannes-eva.net/redoffice-review

official site: http://www.redoffice.com/

[ikuygtyuiouy]

I wonder what MS is offering in 'consultancy fees' to some government officials for that not to become a mandated standard?