From: "Roozbeh Pournader" <roozbeh@sharif.edu>
> > I would heartily recommend that you and the council (and everyone
there!)
> > work to solve the problem that is blocking foreign software companies
from
> > doing business in Iran: the international copyright issue.
>
> I highly agree with you. I have pushed this position many times, but the
> the problem is mainly economical: when the average monthly wage for a good
> developer is $200 (the common wage for a normal worker is 50$ a month),
> how can the developer or the company pay the price of the licenses? When
> all of the good universities are here without tuition, when a CS
> undergraduate obtains a photocopy of Concrete Mathematics for his course
> from his department for less than $2, can he suddenly pay $50? The economy
> will simply crash to a doom.
Well, I have to assume that the economics of software have to start
somewhere -- in a way, they are all living on borrowed time, right? But
generall, software prices integrate themselves into the actual market, so it
may not be as bad as you think.
> There are long-term programs for adapting international copyright (the
> first goal is really WTO membership), but the best of them is 5 years from
> now.
Well, its the journey that counts.... companies make long term plans, too.
So this is good info for planners! :-)
> There is also another barrier for US companies who want to sell software
> in Iran: the US government ban for trade with Iran. This created an
> ethical problem for us, when we wanted to contribute to the Mozilla
> project: we found that we may not even download the source code (see
> http://www.mozilla.org/releases/).
Yes, I did palm this card, sorry about that. I do believe that once other
issues are resolved that this one will resolve itself as well. There will be
trade again some day -- possibly even in this administration if enough big
businesses make the case for profit, etc.
> > I can just about guarantee you that Windows support for Farsi would be
full
> > and quite solid by now if they had been shipping to the Iranian market
there
> > (after all they first started in Win 3.1 and would still be shipping if
it
> > were possible to not see people copying the software and selling the
> > copies!).
>
> Yes. But they now have a solution, the copy protection mechanism they are
> using in XP can be used in a market like Iran's. Now that they can control
> every copy, they can lower the price for poor markets like ours, so people
> can afford it.
Well, they do have high hopes for their plans here, both for Office XP and
Windows XP.
I myself am *slightly* skeptical, due mainly to the many customers of Office
2000 I had in Oz and NZ who had trouble with activations where the person on
the phone reportedly refused to activate them, without even the right of
appeal to a manager or something (others reported this problem was worse in
East Asia though no one I know there could directly verify this).
These problems have reportedly been looked at very carefully so they will
not recur. All I can say is that we will see. They will be interesting
times!
> There is also another approach for software producers: they can target
> Persian users outside Iran. We will help them have good Persian support,
> so they can sell more to them. And no, this is not a small market,
> according to a recent statistics, only last year Iran has lost 220,000
> experts who left the country for good ("expert" is defined as having a BSc
> or working full-time in a specific branch for at least 10 years).
The problem here is of course proving the market. Thats how resources get
allocated -- I have not heard that ths expatriated market here was showing a
huge rise in software sales (though its very possible that there would be no
good way to tell who has been buying Win2000, so this proves nothing). This
would be a market that someone would really have to seek out in order to
prove (unlike markets within a specific country which are easier to
understand).
It may sound cynical, but I think they should try to track the "pirate"
market as well, since the people who are using MS software now (even if
illegally obtained) may well be the ones who will buy the legal software
when they can. Its certainly an interesting way to make a long term business
case (though I would hate to have to present it to a bunch of VPs!).
> > I don't know the official MS story on Farsi support for XP and beyond,
but I
> > have to believe that the unavailability of Farsi's single most
compelling
> > market has to have a negative impact on priorities. Wouldn't you agree?
>
> I agree. But any ideas? We really appreciate anything related.
Well, I gave a few ideas up above. And the truth is that despite all the
reasons why they could do choose to do nothing, support does get a little
better each version. How much better boils down to resources. I know that
they have received information related to keyboards, fonts, collation,
formats, and calendars. How much will be there does depend on way too many
factors to reasonably enumerate and explain in a BOOK, let alone a message
to the Unicode List!
And the book would probably be under NDA anyway. I'll have to write about
something else. :-)
MichKa
Michael Kaplan
Trigeminal Software, Inc.
http://www.trigeminal.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:18:17 EDT