China’s State Intellectual Property Office refuted a news report that ‘Chinese IP officials, together with research institutes, were engaged in an investigation in an international software magnate who was suspected of market monopoly.’

In a statement, the office said the report was seriously irrespective of facts.

It said it had commissioned relevant institutions to conduct studies on domestic piracy rates, and the results had already been released to the media.

‘But we have never conducted investigations in enterprises suspected of monopoly, and have no plan recently to carry out work in such respect.’

The earlier reprorts suggsgt that Microsoft was the target but that was specifically denied.

Yin Xintian, a spokesman and legal director at the State Intellectual Property Office in Beijing, said, ‘We are not conducting an anti-monopoly investigation against Microsoft and have no plans to do so.’

It has taken China 13 years to formulate an anti-monopoly law and many had suspected that Microsoft would be an early target, since a copy of its Office and Windows software costs nearly as much as a new computer in local currency. But Microsoft, too, has said it is not aware of any investigation.

It added: ‘Microsoft fully supports China’s efforts to establishing an environment conducive to promoting fair competition.’ There is also no suggestion that the Microsoft staff in the illustration are under investigation. That was taken in 1978.
Source: VNU and Sydney Morning Herald

It is possible to have several views, simultaneously, about Microsoft. At times it acts as a totally insensitive monster — who else could have let the world suffer with Vista? And, at times, it can be quite sensitive. First there are the truly wonderful charity efforts of Bill and Melinda Gates (and let us not forget Warren Buffett) and then there is the way it donated money to support the Chinese government’s Sichuan earthquake rescue efforts and is now ready to provide training as well as donate PCs and technology classrooms.

The company will donate two fully equipped InfoWagons, open a Partners in Learning (PiL) school, launch a Family Education PC program for rural communities in Miyun county outside Beijing, and provide digital literacy content and training in libraries and iCafés across Xinjiang.

Orlando Ayala, Microsoft senior vice president, Unlimited Potential Group, says these latest rural moves are an extension of the work the company has already been doing in China for many years with its PiL education program and the mobile InfoWagons.

The digital literacy content and training program initiative, a partnership between Microsoft and the Xinjiang government that strives to bring Internet and IT training and education programs to local communities through public libraries and iCafés, is expected to be the first of many across China.

This will be done along with the local PC producer Founder and the Founder Windows PC for Education will have Windows Vista and Windows Live preinstalled, along with new learning software tailored for the Chinese education market. And, yes, that is Bill Gates at the back of the illustration at the top with Hu Jintao front and center.

Very full coverage HERE.
Source: Huliq.com

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reports China’s software exports surged in the first four months of this year, due largely to technological innovation.

Between January and April, exports totaled $3.27 billion, up 54.9% year-on-year.

Software exports grew from $720 million in 2001 to $10.24 billion in 2007.

The ministry said the sector’s income was RMB583.4 billion ($82 billion) in 2007, up 630% from 2001. Chinese software accounted for 8.7% of the global industry last year, up from 1.5% in 2001.

According to the ministry, the software sector’s revenue was RMB193.55 in the January-April period, up 31.2%.

In a very real sense this is the most amazing news about Chinese exports that has been published in these pages.

Software is typically written in code but that code is most often based on English. And the slightest slip means matters go very askew.

So the Chinese coders are working in, as it were, a double foreign language, and still have managed to get a substantial part of the world market. The mind boggles. The illustration is part of a demonstration being given by Microsoft.
Source: Jongo News

That headline, which is something less than positive, may well be correct. The story is that Microsoft will not buy all of Yahoo.

Earlier this month, Microsoft walked away from a proposal to acquire Yahoo for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, after Yahoo turned down the offer, saying it would only settle for $37 a share. Which, to be blunt, was totally stupid. The company was never worth anything like that.

Now a new deal is perhaps being brokered which is short of a full-out merger.

What is very important from the point of view of China is that as part of the deal Yahoo will put its Asian assets, including significant minority stakes Alibaba up for sale.

Which brings the deal down to more manageable proportions and is very good news for Alibaba.

The new deal, if it happens, will have Microsoft working with Yahoo to try and provide serious competition for Google.

Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal estimates Yahoo’s search advertising business is worth about $21 billion, while putting the value of its international assets at $9.25 billion.

Shares in Alibaba dropped 4% on the new proposal, thanks to the greater uncertainty now hanging over the two companies.

For Alibaba getting out from under would be a good thing as Yahoo already has a presence in China and melding the two together would be nigh impossible. Indeed, there are those who think getting the Yahoo search engine to work with Microsoft will take years, if ever. They come from two different cultures, two different types of programming. Alibaba would be well out of it.

Combined, Yahoo and Microsoft would, in theory, have around a 30% U.S. share, compared with Google’s roughly 60%. But that does not factor in a large loss potential as Yahoo and Microsoft customers say stuff this for a complicated game of soldiers and move over to the simplicity of Google.

Note that the proposal from Microsoft would likely complicate ongoing discussions between Yahoo and Google. The two companies are still talking about a possible search advertising partnership but there is no way Microsoft would stand still for that if its purchase of part of Yahoo goes through.

Alibaba has been lining up investors to help it buy back the Yahoo stake, sources told Reuters earlier. That seems likely. If it happens it will make Jack Ma, in our illustration, very happy.

It is all a bit of a mess and will not be resolved for some little while. Best news for Alibaba is that it may be able to get right away from it. Which it should do.
Source: Reuters

Microsoft will spend $280 million on a Beijing research and development center and double its full-time R&D staff in China to 3,000 over the next few years, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Microsoft China’s chairman, Dr Zhang Ya-Qin, said during the center’s groundbreaking ceremony that China is the company’s largest R&D area outside the US. The center will be finished in 2010.

In 2006, the firm agreed to spend US$31 million on R&D labs in China, and it entered into an R&D joint venture with Lenovo last year. Microsoft’s decision to focus R&D on China indicates the country’s importance.

Microsoft does not disclose its revenue from the Chinese market. But Fortune Magazine estimated in a story last year that the software giant’s revenue from China would exceed $700 million last year, about 1.5% of Microsoft’s global sales.

All true and interesting. But no mention of the situation with AliBaba which is owned, in part, by Yahoo! which has just spurned, or been spurned (perspectives differ) by Microsoft. Perhaps AliBaba is the elephant in the parlor.
Source: China Economic Review Daily Briefing and Sinacom

Microsoft is offering to buy Yahoo! for $46 billion. Around the world it may not make very much difference for in search engines Google will still hold the lead. In China it may be something else again.

The theory being put forward by the pundits is that this is mainly Microsoft getting a grip of mobile communications.

At the recent World Economic Conference in Davos, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said mobile Internet services have the potential to spark a ‘huge revolution’ in the coming year, comparable to the ‘re-creation of the Internet’ and the personal computer.

And there is much in what he says. Microsoft is also keen on having a bit of this action and with Yahoo!’s mobile assets and it is possible to see the combined companies coming up with some killer mobile applications.

Does this mean the combined companies will wipe Google around the world?

Not a bit of it. Just getting the two companies to work in synch will be difficult enough.

To get them to a state where they are challenging Google in the search engine stakes is some major task and will not be accomplished in a year or even two.

In his letter to Yahoo’s board of directors, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer touted ’significant benefits of scale in advertising platform economics’ as one of the key advantages of the acquisition. So, on the face of it, Microsoft wants some of the online advertising business where Google currently has about 42% with the rest divided between Microsoft, Yahoo, and Time Warner’s AOL.

The current online advertising market is still search-based. Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft could come close to Google in this field. Google is estimated to have a 58% share of the web search market while Yahoo has a 23% market share and Microsoft something in low single figures.

However, in China the two companies combined will be well set to take on Google which is far from being the market leader. It is possible the Microsoft is gambling first on establishing itself what is currently the second biggest market in the world and may well become the biggest before too many years are over.

There have been cynical comments that when you cross Microsoft and Yahoo!, you get Microsoft. Sadly, there is much truth in that cynicism.

It is an amazing deal and, perhaps, if it happens the first impact will be in China. The second on mobile phones.

But it is not yet a done deal. Add to that Microsoft’s track record on dealing with mergers and you feel the opposition can sleep soundly for the time being.
Source: Forbes

Microsoft’s recent jump in Windows sales can be traced in part to a basic concept — getting more people who use its programs to pay for them.

The company says efforts to curb software piracy have added to its revenue in each of its last two quarters, helping it exceed Wall Street’s expectations.

One analyst says the trend may add a cumulative total of more than $1 billion to Microsoft’s PC Windows revenue over five years.

Microsoft said last week that anti-piracy initiatives in developing nations were part of the reason it saw a spike in Windows revenue during its latest quarter.

Chris Liddell, the company’s chief financial officer, in a call with analysts said the piracy reduction ‘has been a very good trend and it certainly, in the last two to three quarters, has picked up from what we’ve seen in the previous two to three years.’
Liddell credited factors including a spate of legal actions against software counterfeiters in more than 20 countries.

This is all being announced by Microsoft as if it were news. It is not. Microsoft, from its very beginning, has been focussed on extracting more money from the product by fighting the copying of programs.

Back in 1975 the January issue of Popular Electronics described the Altair 8800. Bill Gates and his then partner Paul Allen wrote a form of Altair BASIC and this was the start of Microsoft.

Microsoft’s BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Bill Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked into the community and was being widely copied and distributed.

In February 1976, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter saying that MITS could not continue to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment.

We can therefore date this anti-piracy campaign quite accurately from February 1976 (even though the company was then called Micro-soft) and continuing unabated to this day.

It was an obsession with Bill Gates and thus became an obsession with Microsoft. And in some places like China it is working.

Last summer, for example, Microsoft and the Chinese government announced the bust of a counterfeiting syndicate that the company called the largest it had ever seen — responsible for distributing more than $2 billion in pirated programs.

Also in China, major PC vendors have made commitments to ship computers with legal software preinstalled, and the Chinese government has made a push to use legal software itself.
Source: Seattle PI

This is one of those ‘Man bites dog’ stories. Chinese information technology company Zhongyi Electronic, which is responsible for many of the Chinese characters seen on the Internet, is suing Microsoft for alleged intellectual property rights violations.

Microsoft in a statement, surprise, surprise, disputed the legal claim.

The case brought by Zhongyi involves Microsoft’s use of Zhengma, a Chinese input method editor that allows computer users to enter Chinese characters using Western keyboards.

Lan Dekang, general manager of Zhongyi, was quoted as saying, ‘Microsoft hasn’t paid us for 10 years, since they paid for using Zhengma in Windows 95 in 1998.’

Lan said Microsoft hasn’t signed contracts for the commercial use of the company’s fonts and the input method editor in its Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems.

The case will is being heard in Beijing’s No.1 Intermediate People’s Court and Microsoft has already said it has written license agreements with Zhongyi to use its fonts and input method editor in Microsoft products.

In a statement it said, ‘We entered into these agreements under the supervision and guidance of the Chinese government agencies. Microsoft respects intellectual property rights. We use third party IPs only when we have a legitimate right to do so
‘Microsoft has fully performed its obligations including paying Zhongyi the license fees in accordance with the license agreement.’

Zhongyi plainly disagrees. Hence the lawsuit.
Source: MarketWatch

Microsoft has expanded the reach of its customer service center in Shanghai to cover the entire Asia-Pacific region.

Wing-Dar Ker, general manager of Microsoft’s customer service center for the Asia-Pacific region and seen here almost smothered by flowers, said, ‘Shanghai is playing an increasingly important role in Microsoft’s global development strategy.’

He said the Shanghai center will bring together Microsoft’s customer service, technical support and resources from across the region.

Wing-Dar Ker said, ‘China is providing an average of 30,000 to 40,000 graduates specializing in information technology every year.’ He aid that these IT engineers and designers ‘are giving big support to Microsoft’s business expansion in the Asia-Pacific region’.

The Shanghai center works with the Suzhou Global Institution of Software Technologies to train IT service and support professionals for the industry.

Microsoft said this collaboration helps colleges to use its expertise to cultivate an IT talent pool for the local industry.

The service center is expected to train up to 300 qualified staff in the coming three years. It was originally set up in 1997 and employs more than 850 IT professionals who provide a 24-hour service, seven days a week to global customers.
Source: Jongo News

Microsoft and Founder, China’s second best-selling personal computer, have agreed to pre-install Microsoft’s Windows operating system in PCs. This is described as move to combat widespread Chinese product piracy.

There is no mention that this will also stop Linux getting on the machines as an alternative to Microsoft Vista. None at all.

A joint statement says the agreement with Founder Technology shows ‘the commitment of both companies to protect intellectual property rights’ and promote the growth of China’s information technology market.

Founder will also sell Microsoft keyboards, Webcams and other hardware in more than 500 stores across China.

In March, Microsoft and China’s biggest personal computer maker, Lenovo, agreed to pre-load Microsoft’s tool bar and Web search software on its computers.

Lenovo, the world’s third-largest PC maker is also to load Microsoft’s Windows Live on laptop and desktop computers. This package includes Microsoft’s search service Live Search which competes with Google. All this in the name of preventing software piracy.
Source: China.org.cn