In Singapore illegal silver copies of Microsoft Office XP are already sold on the streets for about US$2.60.
The pirated software is readily available at night markets around the city as well as open-air food stalls and walkways in suburbs such as Petaling Jaya and Bangsar. |
In an interview today, a Kuala Lumpur-based IT consultant, who requested anonymity, said that he paid RM10 for a single Office XP Professional CD, which comes with Word 2002, Excel 2002, PowerPoint 2002, Outlook 2002 and FrontPage 2002 for Web authoring.
He claimed that pirated copies of Office XP have been available in Kuala Lumpur since "before April."
"Once the newsgroups started posting the code, I knew that someone would port it to CDs and start selling them," he said.
Microsoft says the final version is yet to come (on May 31) so this must be a beta version. Well beta or not the product works fine. The legal version of XP would cost about US$526.
Malaysia is currently on the priority watch list of the U.S. Trade Representatives office because many software is illegal in their country. Trade sanctions could be made...
Source: ZDNet
