>>>MS's strategy of making it's software and tools subscription based and accessed through web services won't work in Asia.
>>
>>Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on how far back you step to look at the big picture:
>>http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html
>
>That won't work. They will simply not buy new hardware or software that supports this anti-piracy strategy. The price of Windows XP is the equivalent of the average Thai programmer's salary for a month. In China, 6 months. If they go this route it will force 2/3 of the world's population to Linux on independently manufactured RISC processors. The open source pundants will have effectively won, game over. The only reason the chinese use windows is because it is so easily hacked and there is a pile of black market hardware available to last for years.

Making choices happens already without reaching piracy. People adapt in order to save. For example, since the Windows license is now on the box, we now upgrade the motherboard rather than buying a new PC. If it were attached to the CPU we would just keep a machine longer. Also, because we have several machines close to each other MS Ofice is not in all of them. One even has Star Office, Sun version (it's a test).

What we see in products like Windows and MS Office has a name; it is called diminishing returns, a mature market. It is hard to make killer improvements forever. I think eventually MS will lower prices considerably in order to get people to upgrade, but first they will soak new users with the subscription method.