Re: [tlug] Anyone seen this gizmo yet?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Gen Kanai writes:

 > I think mainly it's because that the manufacturers don't think that  
 > Japanese users will purchase Linux netbooks.

There's more to it than that.  There's a herd mentality in Japanese
industry, and a very strong sense of obligation to past contractual
partners.  Nobody wants to break with the mainstream, and everybody
fears retaliation by Microsoft (which is effectively sanctioned by the
government).  Nor do they really want to hurt Microsoft; that business
has been good for them.

On the demand side, I know my mother-in-law would be happy to have a
mfr-warranteed Linux netbook from NEC or Toshiba -- but she'd ask me,
not the vendor, to maintain it.  (And boy would that make my wife, the
"Windows geek" <snort> in the family, *so* hap-peeeee!<wink>)  But
without the warrantee ... she seems to think that makes it "grey
market" somehow.  A lot of older Japanese (I restrict culture only
because I can't speak from experience for "o-bei-jin" any more)
apparently equate "download" with "piracy".  Not to criticize; from
the comments on YouTube, apparently a lot of YouTube users equate
anything that doesn't come embedded in physical media with public
broadcast by authorized distributors.  Anyway, I think that the PC
brands are quite strong enough to substitute a Linux-based system for
Windows as long as it has a pretty face ... the big problem is that
OpenOffice still sucks massively for interoperability with MS Office.
But that wouldn't bother my mother-in-law who uses email and browses.

 > The Windows monopoly is really strong in Japan (Japanese users are
 > basically the only Asians who pay for software (as a whole nation -
 > a gross generalization but accurate afaik.))

If you interpret "as a nation" to mean "by typical individual users",
that's true.  But India and China are both generating significant
revenues and profits for Microsoft in direct licensing, Taiwan via
OEM licenses, and even more so for companies that provide server
infrastructure software (eg, Oracle and IBM).  But among individuals
(including SOHO business use), software piracy in those countries is
as high as media piracy is in this country.  (Of course, nothing in
Asia is anywhere near like YouTube; even Disney has trouble keeping up
and Warner Media Group will probably bankrupt itself chasing
infringement.)

It's been interesting, I've seen three presentations recently by
Chinese graduate students on piracy in China.  Two of them were survey
studies of user behavior, and they mostly told us what we already
know, which is that suppressing piracy is whack-a-mole: push down on
Napster, Gnutella and Winnie pop up, push down on them, YouTube pops
up (big oops, that one!), and so on.  "The software ecology[sic]
interprets copyright[sic] as damage, and routes around it."  I wonder
if this stuff is BSA-sponsored (even though it leads to the auxiliary
conclusion that BSA damage estimates are inflated by a factor of about
20 in China!)