Microsoft might withdraw Windows from the Korean market

[thewayne]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051028/ap_on_hi_te/microsoft_korea

MS is being investigated by the Korean Fair Trade people mainly for their inclusion of a streaming media player into the OS, making it anti-competitive for third-party vendors. Definitely a valid thing, if you're into this crap. So MS is saying that they might have to pull out of Korea, or that it would at the minimum delay the release of new products into the Korean market.

Let's look at this from a slightly different angle. If you look at South Korea from a gaming perspective, things change. (North Korea don't enter into this, they probably don't have more than a half dozen computers and nothing better than 286's) Korea, per capita, is perhaps the largest gaming country in the world in online gaming. Guaranteed that 95%+ of those gamers are running Windows. So what would happen if a whisper campaign started that MS would have to electronicly deactivate all those copies of Windows until they could get out a localized version that would comply with court orders?

Korea used to have some fairly major riots against the government. Who knows, perhaps they still do, and the American Media just can't be bothered with it any more. I think you could see a lot of people die if something like this happened. And if it seems silly, remember: there are Koreans who have died from playing these games, both from exhaustion and from murder when "he stole my enchanted sword!" To say these guys are fanatics when it comes to online gaming is like saying something tremendously understated that doesn't come to mind right now. :p

Comments

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

I was caught flatfooted a couple months ago when I found out that South Korea was so hysterical about online gaming. Whoda thunk?

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I knew about SK being so rabid from my days (and nights) of playing Diablo II. They had two realms set up for Asia. VERY rabid.

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

The explanation I got was that SK decided to go wholehog about getting the entire country wired and online, even the podunk villages. Everybody has computers and everybody can get online.

Why gaming ate their national brain is anybody's guess though. My brain-like-sieve can't recall, now, if the market figures were that SK accounted for 40% or (I think) 70% of the market. Either way, for a small country, that's a LOT. Especially if it's subsidized, as I'd guess it'd *have* to be.

[magic-rat.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's not so much that everyone in South Korea is online but rather that South Korea proliferates in internet cafes where people can get online easily. The great majority of Korean gamers don't have their own computers; they play in these internet cafes. That's why many of them are quite rude, because they only have a limited time to play so they try to get as much done as they can in that time.

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

That makes sense, actually. I've seen the Runescape players at the library, as an example, who are obviously racing in the front door soon as we open to get their gaming fix -- and they only *get* an hour to play.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we had RS players at Glendale CC computer lab who spent hours playing. We had a number of computers designated "no gaming", they used headphones and were reasonably polite, so it wasn't too bad.

It was a lot of fun for us workers when they re-imaged the machines (basically re-initialized the hard drive and operating system) and they had to re-install the game, bitchig frequently about it.

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

We've certainly had patrons ask why they had to wait for a computer when "that kid" was "just playing damn computer games" ... in our case, it's strictly 1st come 1st served and when it's your turn you can do anything whatsoever you can (that the City Council allows).

Re-imaging -- we call "reghosting" though in long form it's still "installing a new image." Geekspeek.