Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said today that beating software piracy in China and India and getting compliance up to U.S. and European levels will take 10 years.
“In India and China, it will be a decade before we get to that level,” Gates told business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“But as long as there is year-by-year progress, it holds a great opportunity for us in terms of scale, which helps us do more, and it’s a great place where we have people working for us,” he said.
Gates said sales of the company’s software in both countries are increasing every year and he is optimistic that China and India will eventually adopt proper licensing practices, just as Taiwan and South Korea have.
Piracy was once standard in Taiwan and South Korea, but both addressed the problem as they grew richer and produced their own crop of local software firms, he said.
Microsoft has been achieving more than 30% sales growth in China in recent years and has increased its investment in the country substantially, as it has done in India as well.
Industry analysts have long dubbed China the world’s de facto capital of piracy. Illicit copying is a plague for software vendors and other manufacturers of high-tech products, such as pharmaceuticals.
In the long term, Gates said, both China and India will respect intellectual property as they shift from being simply low-cost manufacturing centers to developing their own technologically advanced products.
“We’d like to see more rapid progress on that,” he said.
The rapid emergence of China and India is a dominant theme of this year’s Davos meeting, and Gates said it is inevitable that high-tech business will gradually shift to these new economic powerhouses.
“There have been sectors that the richest country, the United States, has been very unique in driving — computer technology, aerospace, biological products,” he said. “But if you take the things that create innovation, like people trained in science and engineering, and compare it, we’ve had this huge shift.”
The U.S. produces 75,000 engineers a year, and that number is rapidly falling in the U.S. In contrast, India alone trains 325,000 engineers per year, he noted.
Still, the shift won’t happen overnight. Gates said in 10 years’ time, Microsoft will still do most of its research and development work in the U.S.
