The views expressed whenever some form of piracy gets mentioned never cease to amaze me.
Yes, Microsoft and other major software houses charge exorbitant prices and should look at ways of reducing their costs and making their software available at more reasonable prices, unfortunately the sad reality seems to be that it's a catch 22, the more people pirate the software the more prices will escalate as the software houses have fewer sales from which to recover their costs etc. Just look at what's happening with the price of PC games, it's getting ridiculous to the point where I'm now waiting for games to go into classic status or bargain bins before I will buy.
Microsoft did however make an effort to reduce pricing of both Win 7 and Office 2010, just compare the prices of these latest offerings compared to Vista and Office 2007, much better pricing though still heavy on the credit card, especially Office and we won't talk about speciality packages like Visio and MS Project.
The unfortunate reality is that all attempts to combat piracy are doomed to failure due to the existence of the internet and the ease of distributing hacked/cracked software (malware additives included), as fast as the authorities shut down one criminal, ten others pop up.
Pirating games, movies, software and music will continue unless the powers that be find a very different way of dealing with the issue. An excellent book that explains why traditional approaches to this type of problem will continue to fail is The Starfish and the Spider
http://www.starfishandspider.com/
The consumer, sadly, is also very much to blame, as the general view these days is "what's wrong with buying a fake DVD, downloading free music or a cracked game?" fact of the matter is that it's still a crime and rather than look at ourselves and our inability to say no we would rather look for someone else to blame such as the corporations or government.
It's the same thing as police corruption, we'll winge and whine about how corrupt and inefficient our police force has become, but how quickly will we whip a couple of hundred bucks out of the wallet to get through a roadblock or get away with a potential fine for talking on a cellphone etc.
Let's look at ourselves first before we point fingers elsewhere.
