By Angela Gunn, Betanews
Twitalyzer, one of those wonderful sites that makes Twitter feel just a little bit more like a high-school popularity contest, has a sense of humor about what they do: "Having worked with numbers for over a decade we are well aware of the fact that most people don't understand them, even when put in context." After which they proceed to at least try to provide a bit of context for their usage statistics, because what else can you do?
Numeracy is on my mind this week here in Seattle, where the geek contingent failed to block the adoption of a set of high-school math textbooks that spotlights "inquiry-based" or constructivist learning, as opposed to the type of learning where you learn how to do math. The idea of the new curriculum is that if you let students "discover" mathematical concepts on their own, they'll all turn into little Newtons or Leibnizes. And their self-esteem will be exquisite!
Right. Because there's nothing the entry-level American technology job seeker needs to compete with China or India more than high self-esteem. (Even more than we collectively need to have calculus repeatedly re-invented.)
But maybe I'm wrong. After all, I'm looking at the new report from the Business Software Alliance, and the stats that tell me that the software industry needs innovation, fairer pricing, and saner intellectual-property laws to compete tells the BSA that what's wanted is "a combination of consumer education, strong intellectual property policies, effective law enforcement, and legalization programs by software companies and government agencies."
Because that's obviously working for the BSA now. Its own report states that the worldwide PC software piracy rate is up for the second year in a row and the losses from piracy now exceed $50 billion, compared to a legitimate PC software market of $88 billion last year. Exquisite success!
Consumer education and "strong intellectual property policies" have been an epic win for the music industry's RIAA, after all. Just ask how that group's campaign to infuriate users and cripple devices is working out for them. And though I am sincerely impressed with recent law enforcement efforts to weed out warez rings, whether that's actually a law-enforcement priority depends very much on the country in question. (I have friends that rave about the warez storefront shopping experiences in Asia and the Middle East, and I personally have fond memories of browsing a warez mall in Thailand that had better, more knowledgeable customer service than my local Best Buy. Though I'll grant the comparison doesn't raise the bar very high.)
Sarcasm aside for a few sentences, I'm distressed to find the BSA numbers -- for which the formulae but not much of the raw data points are made available in the report -- seem to jiggle if you poke at them.
For instance, the US has the lowest PC software piracy rate in the world, the BSA says. In the world. And yet we have, the BSA says, the "largest dollar losses" from piracy. BSA says that's because we're the world's largest software market, but you know what I think? I think it may have something to do with pricing -- specifically, with pricing that charges US users several orders of magnitude more for the same software package than it does, say, a buyer in India.
(Not to bash India or even China -- though the BSA does, saying that PC sales to "high-piracy" nations such as those two "overwhelmed" anti-piracy progress elsewhere and caused the worldwide stats to jump again. On the other hand, the BSA also praises China in the same report for lowering piracy by 10% since 2003, adding 220,000 IT-related jobs in the last five years for their trouble. Emerging economies, the BSA says, account for 45% of the global PC hardware market but less than 20% of the global market for PC software.)
Many of the report's numbers are truly interesting; I was amazed that four countries in the survey (Zimbabwe, Georgia, Bangladesh and Armenia) all report a piracy rate of over 90%. (Nigeria, for those convinced that the spiritual home of all bad computer-related behavior is there, slides in at 83% after a popular warez-shopping area was shut down, though for tax reasons not for piracy.) The anecdotal information from various areas is interesting, especially when it gives a glimpse at successful multinational efforts to enforce basic IP laws.
The BSA formulae, particularly the ones from which it derives its estimates of the total number of legitimate software units in a given country, are fascinating stuff. But there's a mighty big gap between what the Association presented in the new report and the "proven 'blueprint' for reducing piracy" that BSA President and CEO Robert Holleyman claims to see in the latest numbers. I respect the work that went into gathering the data, and I have a great deal of appreciation for a good old-fashioned stats-crunching session. But the BSA's conclusions, while exquisitely well-tuned to what its constituents want to hear about the organization's work, don't add up.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009