> the cost of a windows/office license is a good portion of (if not an entire) yearly salary

In poorer economies you can just adjust the price to be comparable to local yearly salaries. It's not that piracy means that end users get the licenses for free any way: there are many people who sell pirated versions of Windows and Office.

> removing the tools that help them to compete

You can be just as competitive with Libreoffice and GNU/Linux as you can be with MS Office and MS Windows. The cime of piracy steals a giant market of hundreds of millions if not billions of people from Libreoffice and GNU/Linux and turns these people into second-class citizens.

many software companies choose to upload "cracked" versions of their own software ...

> if they were never going to pay anyway, why not give it away for free? keeping a digital product locked away out of spite is just... spiteful

How do you draw the line between "if you weren't going to pay anyways" and "well we don't have to pay, so we ain't gonna"?

For me that is easy. If used for personal use, make it free (and thus, more popular plus free bug reporting for bleeding edge versions). If used for commercial purposes, not free. Then go after businesses that use unlicensed copies of the software.

So the companies in the poor economies have to pay for it? I understand you're not the previous poster, but these seem to be different motives.

I can't speak for Microsoft, but I could imagine some type of negotiation on pricing based on several criteria. When businesses purchase licensing for such things, there is always a negotiation phase that starts around 60% discount and goes up or down based on many factors.

Why not use libreoffice?

Hmmm that sounds like a perfect use case for...maybe those countries, rather than pirating Microsoft's products, use and contribute to open source projects, like libreoffice, and help make it a proper competition for expensive licensed products.

Some reason they can't use free software?