Who do you think is the biggest software pirate in the world? The answer may be quite surprising. Bill Gates. Yes, that's right, the founder of the famous Microsoft. He pirated his first operating system from a small company in New Jersey and after slightly modification, he later sold it for $600,000 to IBM. With that money, he created the foundation of the current Microsoft empire. If not for software piracy, Microsoft would not even exist in today's computer industry. Is that the only time Microsoft benefited from software piracy? I am afraid not. When Microsoft Windows 3.1 was released, the number of pirate copies was 10 times as high as the number of retail copies. This means out of every 10 copy of Windows 3.1, only 1 copy is legal, and the rest 9 are pirate copies. Does that hurt Microsoft a bit? Not really, because its main revenue was generated from the corporate buyers and the pirate copies were distributed among the common end users. Does that help Microsoft? You bet it did! In fact with the disperse distribution of Windows through pirate channels, it was a means of advertisement for Microsoft in some ways. Windows suddenly became the most popular product on the market and is still dominating. Without the popularity, all of Microsoft's follow up products such as Microsoft Office and Microsoft Visual BASIC, would not do as well as they do currently simply because no one would be using Windows.