Microsoft Racist?
This article in the Korea Times I just found odd.
Microsoft, the U.S.-headquartered software giant, is accused of discriminating against Korean customers in operating its Hotmail e-mail service.
Microsoft Korea yesterday conceded that Korean subscribers are not eligible to extend their storage capacity in Hotmail.
Microsoft Hotmail announced last June that it would expand its storage allowance from a conventional 2 megabytes (MB) to 250 MB for its accounts.
The policy has been applied to nine countries _ the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Canada and Australia _ but Korea was excluded from the list.
Microsoft explained the aforementioned nine nations were picked in accordance with each country?s online advertisement market size and number of Hotmail users.
“Our U.S. head office decides the schedule of the e-mail capacity expansion by the online ads market and subscribers. Korea seems to lag behind in the benchmarks,?? an MS Korea spokesperson said.
Observers point out such logics lack ground because Korea, which boasts of the world?s highest per capita use of high-speed Internet, has 6 million Hotmail subscribers, accounting for 3.2 percent of the global total of 1.9 billion users.
Microsoft Korea refused to reveal the number of Hotmail users by nations but experts point out at least Australia and possibly Canada and Spain would trail Korea in both subscriber numbers and the size of the online ads market.
I’m sure there is a logical reason for leaving Korea off the list for now because Microsoft is not racist against Koreans. Microsoft is about making money just like any business here in Korea and they probably don’t have the memory storage capacity right now to store accounts for Korea but I’m sure once they build the infrastructure to store more memory, Koreans will be able to upgrade their mailboxes to 250mb also.
Then the article adds this:
This is not the first time Microsoft has been suspected of discriminating against Korean customers.
Earlier this month, Korea?s Program Deliberation and Mediation Committee (PDMC) made a report that Microsoft is overcharging Korean clients for its latest Windows operating system software.
According to the report, Microsoft?s Windows XP Pro software sells here for $400.58, about 43 percent more than U.S. prices.
The state-backed PDMC also found Microsoft?s Office software, an office automation package including a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation tools, is retailed at $557.33 in Korea against $499 in the United States.
If Microsoft is discriminating against Koreans for selling software at higher prices to Koreans than Samsung is racist too because I can buy a Samsung TV much cheaper in the states than I can at Home Plus here. Does this make Samsung or Home Plus racist against Koreans?
For whatever reason the countries they chose for the email offering were going to make Microsoft the most money for the memory they had available to offer the public. If you notice China and India were also left off the list and they have much larger populations than Korea. Some of these Korean netizens need to chill out and realize not everything is about the big bad US trying to bash Koreans. It is actually about supply and demand.
I would think that Microsoft also factors in the large amount of pirated software in the ROK, thus in order to make it even worth while to be in this market(ROK) they have to charge higher prices in order to account for all the piracy in S. Korea
That is a great point and probably is the main reason why Korea is being left out of the expanded email and also being charged higher software prices.
Hmmmm. 6.9 million users of 1.9 billion total users…is 0.32% of the global total, not 3.2% as the KT reported. I think I see why they weren't included.