If this were a bank that lost this money but still made over 2.4 billion profit from you would you care? Most with a mortgage would say NO. Well whats the difference, they are both company's.
You will probably find that the loss of sales probably helped with the rise in sales. How can this be you may ask! Well think of it like this. My son has an original Pokemon Diamond DS cartridge. He nags me for weeks to get him Pokemon Perl. I say NO because I think its the same game in a different rapper. He tells me its not the same, what do I do.
I pirate the game by putting it on my flash cart for the week end and give him my flash cart to play Perl. He comes back on the Sunday evening and explains all the differences between Perl and Diamond. So on the Monday I go out and buy him Perl and delete it off my flash cart. As you see, my download goes toward the loss but has now contributed to the gain.
Microsoft has recognized this and has turned a blind eye to some piracy as they know they will get a gain else where by people either buying a legit copy of Windows or by buying a legit copy of Office etc to run on their pirated Windows.
Look at the open source community. They give away a stack of their software, how do they make money?. Well the bugs are ironed out by users of the free package and then they sell the enterprise package bug free. They could technically call the free downloads lost sales but these lost sales make them money.
18/02/2008
Hannah Montana: Music Jam
Kingdom Come