^^ little dipshits like these get me mad. they will brag that they partied in the hilton, but when it comes to software, they wont even spare a single paisa.
same thing with the rich middle-aged women. some of them will stop their merc in the middle of the road i front of a hawker and start haggling like she is in the middle of the Great Depression.
if you can drive around in a merc, you most certainly can pay 5 extra bucks for those potatoes.
i say tax the rich. and add a "tech" tax to those who have a smartphone, proceeds go to charity.
I don't know exact year, but there was 90%+ tax on "rich" people's earnings(before 1990 I guess). They either showed less profits or shifted business to other sectors/countries, effecting Indian economy. Taxes is not the way. Punish everyone who is downloading pirated stuff. Most of my friends don't even know piracy is wrong/crime!
anyway, 30-50% rich tax is good. 90 is overkill, i agree, but, when you can make 20 storey "houses" for a single family, then you can easily pay the same amount for housing the thousand+ homeless around you.
A person who has done MS from a decent university is easily offered ~35-45 lakhs (opening) there. My brother being one of them, has been trying to come back to India, but no company is offering more than 18. So he prefers staying there. And this is what an average engineer earns there. Just wonder what an MITian or a Harvard eng would earn
My uncle has been a GM2 in Siemens (Mumbai) for the past 15 years and he earns close to 30 now.
What u get as an opening package there is what u earn here after 20 years of experience.
Talk of even the IITs (where u ll find best brains in India) - if u leave the top 3 IITs, the average opening package still lingers close to 10 lakhs.
I think the local computer vendors need to be disciplined. They are the ones who are spreading pirated material in the first place. The govt should provide licenses to computer vendors and those who are found spreading pirated software should have their license revoked.
BTW.. I wonder how people still manage to get the "Hot Pix" or other such subscriptions from their GSM providers.. cost 30 bucks/month.. even funny is that they can afford Rs5/pic , watt about caller tunes etc..
on the other hand.. when I asked my ex-colleague from my previous company drawling healthy salary why he doesn't pay for apps.. he said.. "if I'm getting it for free then why pay??" and he is a developer.
It has come to a time where paying for software/music/apps is by personal choice.
I am also going to buy MS Office for my dad. currently using as a trial. I use LibreOffice personally.
People refuse to buy even $1 app cause of rupee to dollar ratio. If u see promo offers on google play or apple store people do buy apps. Similar and recent example is Windows 8.
one can definitely afford 50 rps for useful apps like titanium backup.. 50 rps for app is not a big cost in India.
Now a days microsoft have also reduced the prices.. I got win 8 in just 699 rps (in upgrade offer). long time ago I had also bought office professional edition in 500 only in some promotional offer.. before that I was using student edition of office.
I also use licensed Norton internet security.
The biggest advantage of licensed product is support and it really helps.
I don't pay for softwares usually, mostly use free stuff, I do buy them for Android as they are cheap(poweramp etc), as for games I'd start paying as soon as I get a job.
One issue is dollar to INR ratio, an US guy paying 50$ is not same as an Indian paying 2.7k.
Mainly it because people do not know that they are using pirated material. They fire up their machine running a pirated OS and find all their pirated apps in place and assume that it is part of the machine. It is starts out because of ignorance and takes root that you do not need to pay for apps which you can get for free. Also, the shopkeepers try to encourage this even more.
I for one am not so alarmed at the rate of piracy here, not undermining its severity but the gross overall fate of how the offerings and the market targeted are indifferent to each other.
1. Software is overpriced, grossly overpriced. There is no adjustment to local prices at all, making simple software pricing sound absurd considering the Purchasing power parity.
Do a small task. Take an equivalent of 5000 bucks with you, repeat in different countries. Go buy the same copy of software and then buy the cheapest coffee you can buy (that wont make you sick) with that money. Take a ratio. You will find something disturbing in the results and bring out the inefficient pricing plaguing our country.
Pre-orders on PS3/Xbox games 3500bucks, Win 7 7000bucks no student offer is absurd or just for the rich and SW is supposed to be common place
(I don't use much SW so I can't give more examples. I use Open source alternatives mostly.
Hello Sarath,
Thank you for contacting Microsoft Connect Customer Service.
I understand from your email that you would like to know that if there are any offers to purchase Windows 7 for Students.
Sarath, I would like to inform you that as of now in India there are no such offers or discounts for students to purchase Windows 7. You can visit your nearest reseller to get discounts available. Also please visit our website where you can check for the price and order any product from Microsoft.
URL: Microsoft Store Singapore Online Store - Welcome
Thank you for using Microsoft products and services.
Software companies are not bothered about markets like India and do not release tailored versions for many countries.
On one hand we have exceptions like PC games in India and PS2 games which are locally manufactured. Recently Sony announced a Blu ray manufacturing plant in India which will bring manufacturing prices down and avoid customs for disc imports making the price of gaming discs more viable. Another good and sensible step for making games more efficiently priced.
You will also notice many foreign book publishing companies release India specific (or SEA) book editions which are priced keeping local economic and social factors in mind.
Media such as songs by Flyte (by Flipkart) and movies by Shemaroo / Moser Baer pricing their products right
Such initiatives shows maturity by the parent company, along with their interest and respect to Indian market
The Android store is a big joke. The store showing the tag Indian store and Indian pricing has no stability with pricing at all. Keeps fluctuating with the dollar rate. Why can't we have a proper Indian store? The European stores don't change their prices with such frequency.
We need more people to look at our market with respect to actually fight piracy before pointing stray fingers.
3. Mentality of people buying legal software
You will see many people complaining against piracy say things like, it's ok to pirate stuff from big corporations but doing it from Indies / small developers is gross insensitivity. Buying legal SW is mostly a moral choice and that morality shows a duality here. Even among people who buy legal SW there is a disparity.
4. Pirated content being better quality This is not so much in the case of regular softwares as much as it is for media. Being available in different formats, better compression, no adverts (you have to pay for advertisements )
5. No value for software. The price of the SW licence after you have bought it immediately becomes zero. You cannot re-sell it or donate it to anyone. This reflects when people buy a new system, they always buy an OS in the end for it is of the least value. A new proposed EU law touches this topic by making licenses transferable or resell able with any given time only one person having the right to use a particular SW (license)
6. US Prices are justifiable? Only for software licences? People are fond of saying, you can pay 50 bucks for an app when you pay so much for food, drinks, movies etc. An absurd comparison especially with products/services which have been parred down to comply with local economics. By the same analogy, people fond of EU/US prices for licences should be comfortable with paying $8-10 for a normal movie ticket in India or tip an abysmal dollar or Euro to the auto guy. The auto guy suddenly seems very humble considering he asks for a tip that is equivalent to just 20 or 40 cents, which people cry over.
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Once all these problems have been addressed, maybe then we can comfortably start blaming each other culturally or pick people from our own peers and jab at them...
A lot of other points I would like to make have already been touched upon so I am not really dwelling into them again
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As for me, I have been buying Indian music since school and trying to support in my own way for the music I loved. Although I now realise how even that is a hollow attempt after watching this video
I also buy legal PS software after buying my first 2 games NFS MW and Burnout and really wanted to show them my appreciation. I still continue to buy PS3 games to appreciate the effort Sony has put in.
I do not encourage piracy, I only want effort to be put in from all sectors.
Why people refuse to buy SW? Its not a jailable offense, as simple as that. You go to jail for shoplifting, but you don't go to jail for using a pirated app.
Why people refuse to buy SW? Its not a jailable offense, as simple as that. You go to jail for shoplifting, but you don't go to jail for using a pirated app.
In order to jail someone for using pirated software, you need policemen who know what pirated software is.
Read this :
In another such case, the junior police officers had punched holes in 5.4 inch floppies of yesteryears and systematically filed them as evidence in the charge sheet with other evidence to be produced before the courts. Hard disks were copied manually, CDs were collected and binded together after punching holes through them.
the security implications are scary with pirated apks and other pirated softwares. then people wonder why their card details, login details wound up on the internet. with so much data and 24/7 connectivity people now should realize they are putting their money at risk.
5. No value for software. The price of the SW licence after you have bought it immediately becomes zero. You cannot re-sell it or donate it to anyone. This reflects when people buy a new system, they always buy an OS in the end for it is of the least value.
Unfortunately we have taken Battle Dungeon down for the forseeable future. This was due to high levels of server load created by large numbers of pirated copies of the game. The high load revealed technical issues which we don't feel we can fix to the level that our paying customers deserve.
Hi Guest we just wanted to alert you to a major change in the forum. We will no longer be allowing the posting of outgoing links. Please use the attachment feature to attach media to your posts.
, watt about caller tunes etc.. 
