What are your major concerns when distributing Microsoft products in Vietnam?
The major concern is piracy. In the past few years we have been working with our local distributor organisations and we hope that with Windows 7 we will see less piracy and more people wanting to purchase a genuine version.
We continue to add value, to license genuine Windows, and to explain the value of intellectual property rights (IPR). But it will take some time.
We want avoid pirate copies but we know it is all about education. We have conducted a lot of studies that show that the use of counterfeit products results in a greater chance of getting viruses. And it is not the same experience as with genuine Windows, because we provide product updates to end users. We are trying to fight on two fronts. One is the risk and one is the benefits, while at the same time educating people about the value of IPR for Vietnam’s economy. If the economy wants to develop into a 21st century economy, end users have to understand that IPR will be the next driver of growth in Vietnam, so we have to train people about software products.
What is your comment on the use of legal Microsoft products in Vietnam over the last few years?
Two years ago we signed an agreement with the government for 100,000 versions of Office. We hope to continue this program and have a good relationship with the government from a business perspective, to convince state owned enterprises that this is the way to go. Obviously the Vietnamese Government can set an example, and by showing its strong will to use genuine products we hope that there will be a positive side effect. In fact, the government is losing a lot of tax money with pirated versions of Windows.
Microsoft has had some programs supporting education in Vietnam. How are they proceeding?
We have a lot of programs in the education space. We have one agreement, under which an Office version of Windows can be upgraded by a student or school for a very low price, of less than $30 on top of the OME license. The requirement is that we need to have an agreement with the schools or universities. There is another program called Microsoft Initiative, applied when the government subsidises PCs. There are some countries where the government says they want 10,000 or 100,000 students to have a PC and they will provide a subsidy of up to 50 per cent. We will provide Windows Office at a very low price, maybe $1 per PC. This is when we have an agreement with a government and they are putting something in by subsidising the purchase of PCs.
You have recently launched Windows 7. How will you persuade corporations to upgrade rather than use the current version?
I think it will be relatively easy to convince people to move to Windows 7 because it really is a good operating system. I am confident that most people will enjoy it.
There will be some pressure on organisations to deploy Windows 7 rapidly, as people will experience it at home or at an internet café and will see its value and speed. They will ask for the same in their business environment. We also think that enterprises will move to Windows 7 to save costs. Many companies spend money on maintaining what they are running. They don’t have enough money to innovate as it is difficult to keep running what is running today.
XP needs a lot of work to maintain and update batches and the fact that all users on XP have administrative rights allows the end user to do anything they want on their machine, so it is very difficult to lock the machine and make sure that there is no rogue software installed. On Windows 7 you can have your user running as a non-administrator using simple things. You can prevent the installation of any software that you don’t want to be on your business machine. In Windows 7 we will propose and explain to the user a solution when there is an issue.
