After years of corporate indecision about the Russian market, in December, Microsoft Corp finally took the plunge and established a wholly-owned subsidiary and opened a Moscow office. Since December 1, Microsoft has finally been able to trade in local currency and sign contracts on its own behalf. The office will have recruited its full quota of 11 staff by the summer. The company has appointed Robert Clough, formally Business Development manager of Nantucket Corp, to be its general manager. In 1990 the company released the Russian versions of MS-DOS 4.01 and Works 2.0. In 1991, a popular Russian add-on for Word for MS-DOS was relased by JV Paragraph. But Microsoft has had no official representation in Russia and has worked only through distributors. Its prices were always higher than most other western companies selling localised products. Much to the dismay of local software companies,there is still no Russian version of Windows, but one will be released in the second quarter of this year. Such a show of commitment is a great confidence booster for the Russian computing sector. Continued political and economic instability has caused many western companies to scale down their plans for the former Soviet Union. President of Microsoft Europe Bernard Vernes says the company waited until it was possible to open a wholly-owned subsidiary (the first computer company to achieve this was IBM Corp in July 1991) and when waiting any longer might have given too much of an advantage to the competition. The timing seems to have had little to do with the current economic situation. Vernes says an important factor was that Microsoft Europe managed to push through the opening of four East European offices (Prague, Budapest, Warsaw and Moscow – CI No 2,083) in the fiscal 1993 budget, which was approved by Bill Gates last June.
