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thewaynehttp://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
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
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Date: 2005-10-29 06:06 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-29 09:12 pm (UTC)Re-imaging -- we call "reghosting" though in long form it's still "installing a new image." Geekspeek.