When Microsoft presented its Surface 3 Pro tablet on May 20, Ukrainian users felt the usual disappointment. It wasn’t that the quality of the product was low. It was the general feeling that the newest smart devices come to Ukraine much later than to the world’s leading markets and sometimes don’t come at all.
But even if the new tablet finally breaks the cycle of disappointment for Microsoft mobile devices as many expect, local users will still encounter problems finding earlier versions of the Surface tablet. Another problem is that many Microsoft customers suffer from the lack of mobile applications for their devices.
Still, these are not Ukraine’s biggest problems from the point of view of Microsoft’s business in the country. Up to 84 percent of software in Ukraine is unlicensed, among the highest in the world, Microsoft Ukraine CEO Dmytro Shymkiv told the Kyiv Post.
“Most governmental offices use unlicensed software, which creates national security risks,” he added. Earlier, the computer software giant, which employs 100 in Ukraine, had estimated its losses from this problem at $200 million.
The company is currently pushing software users to upgrade their computers to more up-to-date versions of its Windows operating system. For Ukraine it is an especially sensitive issue since 30.5 percent of local users prefer Windows XP, according to Gemius, a consultancy. On April 8, Microsoft stopped providing technical support for the XP system, which was released back in 2001. According to the company’s report, around 25 percent of computers that run on XP are infected with all kinds of viruses or dangerous software.
However, Bloomberg’s computer technology observer Leonid Bershidsky called Windows 8 “probably the most user-unfriendly since DOS (Disc Operating System).”
Microsoft Ukraine wants to participate in a transition of the country, where almost 40 percent of the population is Internet users, to electronic-governance. Usage of electronic documents and databases, which in turn would reduce paperwork, is a key part of the e-government concept.
“If you want to get a driver’s license – you don’t have to collect all kinds of certificates and pay visits to a whole number of offices, but if there’s an electronic government – all the offices share the information with each other, and you only have to go to their unified web-portal to fill in the questionnaire and get their reply,” said Shymkiv.
Oleksandr Olshansky, head of local Internet Invest Group, does not think that e-government is an effective concept for internal security reasons. “You can manipulate electronic data in many ways, on any level – from central government to ordinary clerk,” he noted.
E-government isn’t a problem in itself, said Microsoft Ukraine’s Shymkiv, but rather an issue of confidence in those who are elected to government.
More than 400 Ukrainian start-ups have received some sort of technical assistance from Microsoft for their business. One of them – Enable Talk – succeeded with its idea of converting gestures into sounds through specially designed gloves that people with hearing impairments have found useful.
But Shymkiv says the overall level of local computer science education is rather low. The market’s requirements differ quite substantially from those that Ukrainian universities deem a priority. As a result, employers have to spend more than $80 million a year to provide additional training for newly-hired workers.
The Microsoft Ukraine CEO thinks cloud services for storing and analyzing big amounts of data are potentially the most prospective for Ukraine’s technological market.
“Quite soon a retiree with a tablet in (his) hands will not be such a rare thing in Ukraine,” adds Shymkiv optimistically.
He wouldn’t agree to disclose the details of Microsoft Ukraine’s financial performance, but its parent company earned $5.66 billion of net profit in the first quarter of 2014 with a 6.5 percent return on equity ratio. Meanwhile, the company’s main rival – Apple – had $10.22 billion of net income and an 8.5 percent return on equity, making it a more attractive investment option so far.
Kyiv Post associate business editor Ivan Verstyuk can be reached at [email protected].
