I got my start using pirated Macromedia and Adobe products and now I'm a full paying customer. Product suits like this would greatly benefit from giving schools access to free student licenses to get young people hooked and trained on their products so when they enter the workforce they're ready to pay for it.
Or even better: the Microsoft approach of giving students everything for free, so there's no reason for colleges not to use Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, C#, you name it. They're all good products, so there's little reason not to use all this free Microsoft software and teaching material.
I don't think I've seen many European IT college graduates who weren't basically Microsoft schooled, with a small side of HTML and Java.
Of course, computer science is a little more agnostic. Universities in general are, where they even accept digital documents that are PDF. But Microsoft's model seems to be very effective. It doesn't cost them anything to give people something they wouldn't be able to pay for, and it gets them, like you said, hooked and trained.
