Every computer comes with Windows anyway.
Yes - and look at all the effort Microsoft expended over the years to make people believe that.
On a related note, has anyone ever heard of a pirate installation of Windows being disabled by Microsoft? I think they've threatened to do this and could, in fact. But the interesting question is, would they want to?
If all of those millions of PCs in the world running unlicensed copies of Windows were unable to do so any longer, their users would either have to give up computing or adopt another OS. That other OS would almost certainly be a Linux of some description.
You would think the fact that Linux is free, whereas Windows costs a fairly large lump of money, would give it quite an advantage in the market, wouldn't you? And yet I see that only 1.22% of visitors to my website in the last 12 months (or of the ones that don't disable cookies, anyway) used Linux.
I conjecture that there's a good reason for this. Linux has an invisible competitor. It's free, like Linux, but unlike Linux it's 90% compatible with Windows. It's called "Pirate Windows".
...OK, you can't upgrade PW, and it won't play that newest mega-game, but my cousin told me they're working on a hack for that...
91.4% of my visitors used Windows of some sort. Does that mean Windows has 91% of the OS market? No, because a market is about selling things, and my web stats count users, not purchasers.
I don't know how many, but I'm sure a lot of those Windows users didn't pay for the product. You could say they stole it, but is Microsoft screaming Thief? It's actually good for Microsoft that all of these people are using PW. They may not be generating revenue, but neither are they defecting to the Linux camp and making those user numbers grow.
It would be interesting to know roughly what percentage of the world's Windows systems are licensed. Microsoft probably has a pretty fair idea. Do you think they'd tell us, if we asked nicely?
There's another angle to this too - since unlicensed copies of Windows can't be updated, every one of those illegal machines is vulnerable. I wonder how significant this is in terms of general net security. Is Microsoft effectively encouraging botnets?
The kids with their salvaged machines don't care, of course. As long as the lag's not too bad, you play. But if it's a bit slow, because of the spambot running in the backround, and the keys are a bit slow to respond because of the long chain of keyloggers hooking the keyboard events, you call your cousin and he comes, reformats, reinstalls PW, and you're good to go again.