The Business Software Alliance is planning to expand its bridgehead in East Europe to include Poland in the near future. Eric Konig, a Microsoft Corp employee in Paris, is spearheading the move, which is likely to bring the Alliance into rivalry with Poland’s existing anti-piracy body, PRO. PRO is affiliated to the Software Publishers Association, but has not brought any prosecutions in the country and appears to have rubbed at least one of its members up the wrong way. Marek Goschorski, co-founder of the Polish hardware and software distributor MSP (1992 revenues $3.6m) which claims to have 45% share of the Microsoft distribution market, accused the body of obsessive self-promotion and said that an unpleasant dispute had broken out between the organisations after MSP had refused to unpack the 100,000 software packages that go through its hands each year and attach legal software stickers. Pirated packages are generally said to constitute 90% of the whole market in Poland, though the Alliance itself stubbornly refuses to make up such estimates for journalists. However, Goschorski argued that such statistics probably over-estimate the significance of the problem to software vendors anyway. He reckons that he is distributing around 70,000 application packages a year and MSP has half the market; put that together with sales of around 50,000 home-grown MS-DOS word processing packages, add 10,000 copies for high-end application sales, and the net result is that the ration of legally-shipped applciations to International Data Corp’s estimate of personal computer shipments is around 1:1; not far off the recent recorded UK ratio of 1.3:1. The difference, according to Goschorski, is that while the typical west European user will have, say one spreadsheet, a typical Polish user will have 1-2-3, Excel and Quattro – all three.
