For developing countries and emerging markets, it has long been accepted practice to pirate Microsoft products even within government organizations and mid- to large-sized businesses. While Microsoft has a grand anti-piracy public stance, it has been suspected that they accept some level of piracy in order to keep people using their platform, as well as hold a form of leverage against their clients. Recently, the president of Microsoft’s business division, Jeff Raikes, has admitted as much. In an interview he gave at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference last week, Raikes said:

“Our number one goal is that we want people to use our product. If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else. And that’s because we understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the install base of people who are using our products. What you hope to do is over time you hope to convert them to licensing the software, legally licensing it, so on, and so forth…”

Raikes specifically mentions China and Brazil, two markets which are swiftly making an overall move to open source software. You can read the full story here.