CHANNEL TALK - Vlad the imposter

According to The Guardian, Russia buys the same number of PCs as Australia, but manages to get by on less than a tenth of the amount of genuine software.

The good news is that Microsoft Russia is celebrating a huge success this week because software piracy is down to its lowest ever level. The bad news, unfortunately, is that this level is 91 per cent. It is, however, a fall of three per cent on last year. One of the weird ways Microsoft Russia tries to reduce piracy is by encouraging flea market traders to sell genuine Microsoft gear alongside pirated disks. The way to do this is by offering higher margin than the pirates - not difficult in a country where a fake Microsoft disk goes for three dollars.