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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (669)	9/3/2003 6:26:15 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6370

Doing the China dance By John Lui, CNETAsia Wednesday, September 3 2003 8:33 AM commentary Poor Microsoft. It's a cliché to say that the Asia-Pacific region is an area bound by geography, but in everything else, the countries could well be separated by oceans. But if you've been reading this site, you may get the impression that there's one thing they agree on in China, India, Korea and Malaysia. They don't have a lot of love for the giant from Redmond. The source of the feelings, which range from a baleful tolerance to veiled hostility, may seem obvious: Microsoft is big and bullying. It can charge what it wants and we'll pay it. To add insult to injury, users are pitched onto an endless treadmill of bug fixes and security patches. But this list of complaints doesn't really hold water at the government level. In fact, the Microsoft system is actually an eerie mirror of democracy in Asia: Incumbents accumulate, newcomers disintegrate. So it would seem that Microsoft and Asian governments would fit like two happy peas in a happy pod. Bureaucrats get to work with--and milk--one fat organization, rather than fuss with a bunch of small ones. So what are we to make all the anti-Microsoft rumblings across Asia? Reason number one: Asian governments are jealous governments. In Malaysia, the government of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed prides itself on being maverick. Judging from the tone of official press reports, it's also sick and tired of being blamed for fostering regional software piracy. By needling Microsoft through official support of open source software and threatening to clamp price controls on imported software, officials send out a message: Don't get uppity. And when officials toss a rival into the mix--Linux, or MySQL, or WPS Office for example--even big dogs like Microsoft come to heel. Linux: It's so good, if it didn't exist, Asian governments would have had to invent it. In fact, it's so good, they're re-inventing it. Reason number two: Foreign firms are a ticket to ride--at a price. China may look like a manufacturing powerhouse. What you don't see is that Sony, Pioneer and Samsung and their shareholders take in most of the profit. Chinese brands have to sell on price, so their margins are lower. To make it worse, the MPEG folks get their cut from every DVD player, Qualcomm takes a bite out of each CDMA2000 phone sold, and so on. Microsoft, like every foreign firm with a lock on intellectual property, is a Janus-faced force that helps China go global, but wants to get paid for doing so. Reason number three: Nobody is indispensable. Fact: Tech R&D departments don't hire a lot of people. Software development houses, even huge ones, can't soak up labor the way a steel mill or shipyard can. Oracle and Microsoft can set up all the centers that they want, but they won't make much of a dent in the unemployment rolls. IBM, Sun, Oracle and Microsoft are far from being an indispensable source of jobs in India and China. U.S.-based firms have to perform delicate choreography in Asia. Governments here know foreign firms, like rich tourists, will suffer being shaken down, roughed up and worked over as long as there's going to be a payoff. At the same time, officials can't be too bullying--they can't afford to drive the foreigners away completely. Despite all the barking from grumpy governments, firms like Microsoft know that the bites, if they come, will be in the distant future, after domestic software is good enough to offer an alternative. Until then, strike up the band--it's time to dance. asia.cnet.com