Microsoft in Russia: +25%. What about Autodesk?

According to the article in the Russian daily Vedomosty (partially based on the IDC data, the Russian sales of Microsoft in 2010 grew by at least 25% while the whole Russian software market increased by only 15%. IDC estimates the Russian income of MS in 2009 as $800M and correspondingly as 1 billion in 2010. At the same time, IDC believes that the total volume of Russian software market during 2010 increased up to $ 2.3 billion which means that MS's software market share in Russia is today about 43% (looks strange to me).

The sources of this MS growth are more or less clear:

- general market recovery after the crisis,

- success of Windows 7,

- increase of the share of legal software, primarily due to the corporate sector,

- expansion to the Russian regions: the number of MS regional offices/partners has increased over the year from 58 to 70.

Why, in this context, I mention Autodesk? Just because among the CAD vendors in Russia it's only Autodesk which can somehow be compared with MS: of course not by the income but in particular because in Russia Autodesk is definitely the No.2 actor (aggrieved party) of all cases on the illegal software, obviously - after Microsoft. Autodesk, as practically all CAD vendors operating in Russia, never opens absolute data about its annual income, however comparative changes are usually announced. Thus, I am interested in how the Autodesk growth in Russia within its financial year corresponds to 25% of MS and to 15% of the whole software market. Everyone who has seen the Russian Autodesk Forum 2010 (see some pictures) can hardly imagine a lack of considerable growth of the Autodesk sales in 2010:).

Well, another source of MS-Autodesk associations is a recent media flash (joke? provocation? non fantastic scenario?) about possible acquisition of Autodesk by Microsoft. I wouldn't love such development. However anything can happen in our world.

Source (in Russian): here.

AutoCAD for $50: Scandalous Suspension of torrents.ru in Moscow

Yesterday a discussion section of the Autodesk Russian web site was attacked by numerous angry users of torrents.ru. The Autodesk web site administrators had to clean up their pages from obscene words blaming Autodesk as guilty for temporary closing of the very popular torrents.ru which then moved from Russian hosting to rutracker.org.

The closing was initiated by the Moscow prosecutor's office which opened an investigation against the web site. The investigation has found that torrents.ru users downloaded illegal software – in particular, those of Autodesk and of 1C (the largest and a very popular Russian ERP vendor). For example, a purchase of AutoCAD for the price $50 was traced to torrents.ru.

As I can conclude from the discussion at the Autodesk Russian web site, the company denies any explicit or implicit suggestions that these actions would have been performed on behalf of Autodesk which got the news in the same way as all other people – from the media, meaning that law executors never ask the right holders what should be done to lawbreakers.

For me, the key point of this episode is that among angry comments at the forums there was no blaming of the illegal software downloading. In particular, in a related discussion at isicad.ru (where I am the editor) one of the angry CAD professionals, an active visitor of isicad.ru who does not look like a friend of Autodesk:), argued that the prosecutor's decision was not fair because (a) “in Russia you can buy illegal software everywhere almost for free; this is a basic feature of Russian mentality” and (b) can’t believe that Autodesk did not itself initiate the case.

So, many people in Russia believe that a simple and straightforward interpretation of the torrents.ru case (and similar cases) is improbable; and prefer looking for some underlying reasons. A nice example is an opinion – repeatedly expressed at some web forums – that recent severity of the Moscow prosecutor's regarding torrents.ru is related to a current visit of a USA high-tech delegation to Russia (see my post John Donahoe, CEO of eBay, joined Twitter in Siberia): i.e., the Russian authorities are pointedly demonstrating to the international community their strong commitment to combating against illegal software and more generally – to establishing the rule of law in Russia.

Whatever it is, the actual trend is positive: compared to 90% of illegal software in the 90s, today this indicator is estimated as 70% or less. My own impression is that, in spite of the above mentioned comments, social mentality (at least in high tech) is slowly but definitely developing in the right direction.

One of the sources (in Russian): a Vedomosti newspaper article.
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