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MS Plans Low-Cost Windows for Brazil
Atryn writes "According to this C|NET article, Microsoft is planning to release its XP Starter Edition in Brazil. Could the pressure of Brazil's overtures toward Linux be forcing Microsoft Brasil to compete?"
It is far too limited to be useful to anyone. Users who need to use the computer will pirate. Government will not be stuck with a stripped down almost unusable copy of Windows, when they could build their own hack of linux and use that on their boxen. The only people I would expect this could be useful for are Computer Manufactures.. who will just throw a copy of Starter on the computer for a bit less money.
Proceed with Format (Y/N)? Y
Except that this is a stupid deal.
Who would want to buy a crippled operating system? The capabilities of an operating system should be dependant on two things only: software producing capabilities (you need to write the software after all and it's not an easy job to do) and hardware. Marketing reasons aren't on the list, so that MS could sell it's "normal" operating system on an artificially inflated high price.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
The Starter Edition would be good for shop displays though. It'd stop those pesky kids from using multiple net send commands and filling the screens with porn popups.
Here in South America (I'm from Argentina) Linux is getting more and more attractive, specially after sucesive devaluations(1 U$s = 3 Pesos) Most of the budget PCs here come with diffrent flavors o'linux preloaded, but unfortunately ppl get a friend or pay a tech to install copies of Windows, due to the fact that it is the system the know how to use, either because they work in it or they are just plain used to it. I think Microsoft will eventually release these "crippled" versions everywhere, bundled or otherwise and finally, after ppls complaints will release a "less-crippled" version or reduced priced versions of the originals. It would be nice to introduce Linux in the corporate scene.It would make a lot of things easier.
It doesn't have to work. Microsoft is doing this for one reason and one reason only: to continue competing with Linux.
If they didn't release these crippled products in these countries, people would get the idea that they couldn't compete. That is far more dangerous to Redmond's position than a failure of a crippled OS in developing markets.
As an added benefit, it gives people the impression that Microsoft thinks a lame version of XP is sufficient to compete against Linux.
MS is trying to introduce this "starter edition" in Brasil because the goverment is planing in creating a cheap computer to connect the lower classes to the internet. This sheap computer is planed to be shipped with linux, but MS is trying to convince the goverment that this "crippled edition" is better.
The best quote I heard from a goverment official is that the Brasilian goverment will not help to stablish the MS monopoly.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
We don't want to provide a version of XP without Media Player to the EU. That would be catastrophic to our business.
However Thailand can have this nice stripped down version of XP.
"I would consider that barely useful!"
I'd say, so does Microsoft. The plan is to no doubt give people a taste and entice users to 'upgrade' to a full version. I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't laced with various pop-up dialogue boxes; "To activate this great feature, purchase XP full..etc.." but I'm not sure that would happen at all.
These people aren't forking out a few hundred bucks for a 'full' OS, they'll just see what they're missing out on and pirate it.
If I bought a new car and only three of the gears worked, I wouldn't upgrade to a newer model, I'd go to their competition. The competition in this case just happens to be a pirated model, or (shock, horror) doing without a computer at all.
I hope this plan fails miserably. It deserves to.
This is the software equivalent of those first cigarettes behind the toilet block. You know, the ones that get you hooked for life.
Take me for example. I wanted to play old games with people across the internet which required an IPX network. Microsoft's home grown solution is their VPN client/eserver package which is naturally built into the entire user/security system. Anyway I wanted to use this system for gaming, just one problem: I had/have windows xp professional. This version of windows has an arbitrary limit of one VPN connection. If I want multiple VPN connections I need to buy Advanced Server. Now coming from their point of view there might be some sort of reason for this cripple ware, but coming from my point of view they want me to pay a couple thousand bucks to play old games.
How does this make me feel? Infuriated. I have yet to find a suitable replacement (there used to be a few online services which created IPX networks but you had to play by their rules and pay monthly fees). Thank you Microsoft, for dangling the carrot in front of my face, letting me smell it, and then ripping it away. The final snub is (I am told) when installing Advanced Server it asks you how many connections you want to be able to accept.
Ah well it really just comes down to me complaining, but it sure doesn't make me like Microsoft anymore. Remember when Notepad used to have an arbitrary file size limit? (The limit value wasn't arbitrary, the fact that they had it was)... Good times.
one would wonder how hardcoded into the OS the limits such as 3 applications and max ram and HD are, and how much of an effort it would take a decent programmer to crack it?
If you pay your taxes you support terrorism!
This is all funny to me because I've been using free and open source softare for a few years and I have a powerful GUI, tons of utilities, and can launch dozens of applications at the same time. Ubuntu with Kubuntu took a great deal less time to install than Windows does, and is a lot more fun. So in this case something free (in my opinion, anyway) is better than something merely cheap.
But the even more funny irony of this starter edition is that it actually required extra work to cripple it. It's not a product that required less work, it required the opposite (more). Think about that for a moment. No other industry could possibly work this way. To create this "cheaper" version Microsoft had to devote extra time and money to crippling it, packaging it and marketing it. To use the obligatory car-industry-versus-computer-industry analogy, it's a bit like building a complete Humvee, chopping off bits of it and selling it for the price of a used Yugo. It required all of the work of building the Humvee, plus extra time and money for a Yugo-equivalent crippling, and now sells for the Yugo price. I'll stick with my Sherman tank, and recommend Brazil does the same.
A brief disclaimer, I am an american who has now been living in Brazil for the last three years.
;)
Microsoft is just following what the game industry has been doing for the past few years here.
The huge amount of pirated software and DVD's, and CD's at places around Brazil has actually caused the prices of the legitimate versions to drop dramatically. Piracy it seems does make a difference.
I can get a legitimate copy of any top shelf PC game in Brazil now for about $10 US. The only difference is it comes with a Brazil manual and a huge sticker saying NOT FOR SALE OUTSIDE OF THAILAND.
Buying a pirate copy of that same game costs: $6. (so if it's a 2 CD game, then the price is $9. if it's a 4cd game it's MORE expensive to buy the pirate version!)
Apparently the manufacturers think they can still make a profit selling games for $10 USD. They are actually trying to compete with pirates, rather than arrest them, and it seems to be working. People are buying more games, and less pirated ones.
That's not to say if Brazil wasn't blessed with an incredibly corrupt and ineffectual law enforcement, things wouldn't be different.
... Microsoft will learn just how useless it is to expect to win the game of Whack-A-Mole.
What I find that might even be funnier is that while Microsoft is busy dumping less expensive (and less functional) copies of Windows XP out on the market in an attempt to stave off the adoption of Linux, they may be making it harder to get people to move to Longhorn. More than one pundit has written a piece about their installed base doesn't move to the latest and greatest (and, of course, the most secure|stable|whatever ever) version of Windows because they've decided that the current version is ``good enough''. Microsoft is only compounding their installed-base problem by releasing XP-lite in Brazil. Some users will buy it to ``get legal'' but those people may be satisfied enough with XP-lite that they become a problem for MS when Longhorn finally comes out. Those who don't buy into XP-lite probably wouldn't have in the first place and will either continue running pirated versions of Windows or switch to Linux. I'd say MS loses no matter which of the three paths a Brazilian user might take.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
If they didn't release these crippled products in these countries, people would get the idea that they couldn't compete
I would say looking at what they have crippled and/or removed, they are already sending a very loud and clear message that they can not compete. 800x600 max resolution? No more then 3 applications running? What is that, like 1992? They might as well start selling DOS and Windows 3.1 with the Trumpet Winsock TCP/IP stack. That would actually have more capability then what they are offering here. Heck, I ran almost exactly that with a 486DX33 and it worked great. I'm sure AfterDark(R) could start selling some new and improved screen savers for it too.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
In Asia where MS has already launched the Starter Crap Crack-Whore Edition, most user simply wipe off starter edition and replace it with the $2.00 Pirate XP Pro.
Some analyst or other did a study of Linux pre-installs on cheapo machines. In most cases the Luser would wipe Linux off and go ahead and Pirate Windows anyhow, however 12% kept Linux on the Machine. 12% of the population in Asia is quite a bit especially in India and China. The 12% in Brazil, China, India, Ect could give Linux the marketshare to make shareware makers, The Big Companies like Adobe & Corel which make lower cost home versions of the software (Photoshop Elements/Corel Essentials), and small developers (game developers also) the incentive to publish to Linux. Once the they are on board then Linux would draw more users. More users would also mean that companies like Napster, Apple, Starz/ENcore wouldn't lock Linux out of the digital content (as is the case now) which would also draw even more users. Whith enough Users on board then Macromedia, Adobe, Corel, and all the big players would port bread and butter apps to Linux as their would now be a sizable market and MS would loose.
Really Microsuck isn't doing anyone a favor here except themselves. The problem is that becuase Adobe, Macromedia, Roxio (or whomever owns the software division minus Napster), ect do not port to Linux/BSD/Whatever they are leaving a huge void for the FOSS comunity, many of which have programing skills, to slowly develop apps that would compete with them simply becuase no apps exisit in that space. The problem, as JASC & Adobe are finding out with the GIMP & Inkscape/Sodipodi, is that Linux apps don't have a tendancy to stay just Linux Apps. The popular apps tend to get ported to well just about every platform when they mature. What they are finding is that instead of fighting realitivly imature buggy apps with no following, documentation, and limited features is that full grown mature apps are crossing over from Linux into MS World where they begin to eat the apps companies lunch.
I hope to see this reduced functionality XP OS to be enhanced to give me a 'cut the crap' OS with just the basics + the ability to install just bout any win32 program.
I really dislike that the XP OS CD has millions of lines of code I'll never ever execute such as the customizable screen widgets.
Maybe linux distros could learn a thing or two about shipping 1/4th of the applications they ship now.
God, PLEASE, if you exist, give Brazil the senses not to buy into this microsoft (lower-casing/deprecation of their name intentional/perpetual with me...) "reduced-price-digital-crack" addiction. Open your arms and take them to our bosom and nurture them (oh, sorry, you probably have people thinking god is a man...)
... Previous message: The Swedes discover Lotus Notes has key escrow! ... law enforcement agencies the technological capability to intercept such messages. ...
Brazil, if you're listening, REGAIN your freedom and independence. Your national security, privacy, sovereignty and more are at stake when you use a so-called operating system the encryption keys of which have to be escrowed with UNITED STATES security agencies.
See:
Roger Clarke's Crypto-Confusion
http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/Cry pt oConf.html
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http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pipermail/ukcr yp to/1997-December/039896.htmlhttp://www.chiark.gree nend.org.uk/pipermail/ukcrypto/1997-December/03989 6.html
The Dishonesty of ``New Labour'' Crypto Policy
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pipermail/ ukcrypto/1997-December/039896.html
- 4k - Cached - Similar pages
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I've seen those "men in black", once around 1994 at a company where I temped and they were there to pick up quarterly-escrowed keys. I joked, "WHo are THOSE guys? NSA comin' to pick up crypto?" Someone admonished me, with "SHHHHH!! That's EXACTLY who they are, and don't let them hear you..."
Now, surely, the NSA and other spook agencies in and outside of the US can crack your traffic in time, but YOU have right, a duty and an obligation to make it as freakin' hard for them as you can.
It's ONE thing to mandate escrowing of crypto agains your OWN populace, but to have an external entity impose that on you is nearly tantamount to war, de-facto demanding you make your systems more transparent and susceptible to monitoring, cracking, and inspecting-- remotely and nearly anonymously-- unless you baseline all your government facilities' packets and fingerpring for traffic doing weird things.
Use F/LOSS tools, get a grip on your future independence, and join the tech wagon instead of being a consumer-whore to the currently "OS" like so many other nations. Brazil, you HAVE to find your own national flavor of OS and partner with others just like Japan, Korea and China are. The crypto can be cracked, eventually, even in F/LOSS, but at least you don't have to develop a system that HAS to be reported to NSA before it even reaches your shores or backbone.
If you can't find yourselves getting off ms' digital crack, then at LEAST demand more transparency of the OS code and demand that ALL encryption be removed and made modular. DEMAND that ms indemnifies you and defrays any costs which its past, present and future trickery (convicted monopolist, ettc...) places upon you. Develop your own governmental and public-use encryption scheme, after you demand that their encryption modules be transparent so that F/LOSS modules can be dropped in. But, none of this will be useful if your students and adult users don't learn more about computers and personal responsibilities and limitations and duties to secure their systems, safeguard personal information, and learn rudimentary encryption or system-health tools.
Your future may very well depend on it.
Just "say no to digital crack", and be a little cleaner. Your future generations deserve to have their country not snagged hooked-line and sinker by an external hegemonic corporation. Sure, Central Amerrica and South America have historic government and enterprise issues dogging your lands from the past, but don't let an outsider money-groping convicted monopolist steer your country. I'm not saying this as a "rabid Open Source Looney", but as a person who believes in right over might, REGARDLESS of w
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The best quote I heard was something like -- "We don't want to promote a second-class operating systems to the poorest".
I don't think so.. Argentina is doing a similar thing, except they sell the $300 computer for $700 (around $17/month for 40 months), with "Windows XP® Home Edition" (whatever, I'm just pasting from the website). Microsoft is one of the main sponsors of this thing.. My point is, if they're spending all that money, they're more likely to buy some politicians so they can institute something like this (and get a nice return on their investment). They're not a charity.
Some trivia: the name of the program is "Programa Mi PC". "Mi PC" is the name they use for the "My Computer" icon on the spanish version of windows.
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Time to dig out all those forgotten Win98SEs... they might not have the more stable NT core but at least they suffer none of the nonsense restrictions and it also has more functionnal file sharing than XP Home.
Of course, with Win9x, a firewall (at the very least) is pretty much mandatory.
I almost go berserk when I have to deal with XP Home because stuff I use all the time is either "misplaced" or disabled... if I had to deal with XP Starter, the temptation to simply throw the whole PC out the window could be dangerously strong.
I hope competition will eventually force MS to drop XP Pro pricing to a reasonable level... like $100 retail-boxed - but I will not be holding my breath. In the meantime, I love free, campus-wide-licensed MSDNAA stuff.
Anyway, the way Microsoft is selling such outrageously crippled Windows XPs is... outrageous. If it were not for programs requiring Win2k or higher being increasingly more common, I would still prefer Win98SE over XP Home/Starter.
Yes, Starter is not worth using. An XP Starter CD belongs pretty much to the same value category as AOL CDs. An OS that cannot be used to do anything useful is not worth the CD it is distributed on or the bandwidth used to download it.
At least we can get some form of consolation from the fact that XP Starter asian launches so far have been practically absolute failures. Let's hope this bulk rejection trend will continue and that MS will eventually make the right choice: kill Starter, slash Home and Pro prices... to something like $60 for Home and $120 for Pro.
Wouldn't it be illegal if they sold the same product for 2 drastically different prices in different places?
No. Not in the slightest.
In fact, the EU goes out of its way to specifically protect the ability to internationally discriminate in price. Tesco Plc. was importing Levi's to the UK from resellers in the US. It could buy through a middleman and ship across the Atlantic cheaper than it could buy them directly, because Levi Strauss's geographically discriminatory pricing policies. As a result, it was selling Levis at half Levi's UK MSRP.
So Levi Strauss sued, and won in a case that went all the way up to the European Court of Justice. Tesco had to stop reselling Levi's jeans legally purchased outside of the EU unless it had Levi's permission for the resale.
54 isn't really a lot. Currently running are
3 Antivirus related processes
1 browsing related processes
3 Java-related processes
4 processes related to VMWare
4 processes related to serving SSH through CYGWIN for remote access
10 hardware-specific processes
1 bittorrent client
3 processes related to Kerio Personal Firewall
6 copies of svchost, serving DLL's to unknown applications
3 closed but crashed copies of wmplayer
15+ OS processes
1 Macrovision copy protection process (!!!)
A copy of ABC that shouldn't actually be running right now.
While five of those are duds, overall 54 is a very acceptable number... given that this is both desktop and server, and has a lot of unique hardware attached.
What's more important is that the page file is currently only 1/2 of the available RAM, and the CPU usage history hasn't spiked to 100% (or even 50%) under this light usage. Oddly enough, 10% of my processor is going to print spooling, despite having no printer activity currently. But printers drivers have always been a bit flakey, and I do have three real printers and a few virtual printers attached to this machine.
The ______ Agenda
I am not an economist.
In a hi-tech market, the R&D cost is much greater than the manufacturing costs, and marginal costs are much less then average:
dC/dq << C/q
where C(q) = cost to produce q pieces.
This way, if you want to release a cheaper product without undermining the market for the expencive one, you can
(1) make r&d twice, pay twice the cost, collect twice the price for both
(2) cripple the expencive one, ???, profit.
(3) totally lower the price, go out of business, let your competitors rape the customers
Corps tend to choose (2) and it's somewhat good for the public: gamers buy GHz and real people buy workhorse machines and research is done once, not twice. (next post already pointed it out).
Expamles are countless: USRobotics sportsler and courier modems, 486SX, celerons (at least some of them), as well as Qt, Star/Open Office, RHEL/Fedora...
Those, who can, buy, those, who can't, buy too.
It's not crippling product, it's doing the expensive research once, not twice.
And yes though I've never used XP Stopped Edition I think it's crippled a bit too much, and could be harder to use than Linux for those with no computer experience.
But Brazil is trying to get more independence, and possibly won't take it anyway. I'd rather see my country to go Linux, too...
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
Actually, it cost Microsoft ADDITIONAL development and testing, above and beyond what they spent to develop the normal version of XP, to cripple what they already had. And it'll continue to cost them money, since every time they release a security patch or service pack, they'll have to make sure it works on the crippled version as well.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Good point, but it would be inconsistent with their recent policy of making pirating Windows more difficult (online activation and such).
They cannot have it both ways, as in stopping Windows pirating AND "competing" against Linux with easily pirated versions.
C - the footgun of programming languages
They should know that noone will listen to them, because they make most of their money out of noone listening to the linux and mac zealots telling people about (arguably) better operating systems than Windows.
The Brazillian people will use what the Brazillian government give them, and couldn't give a fuck what operating system they use. Perhaps if their plan is a success (and I can't see it not being a success) other second/third world countries will follow suit and heavily promote linux.
Exactly!
If you stick with applications that are of the same 'vintage' (or earlier) as the OS then things generally run smoothly.
I have a 6 year old old Toshiba 520CDT laptop with 96MB running W2K. It's no speed king, but it does a useful job.
I use Office 97 and Visual Studio 6 on it mostly, with IE5 as the browser and Paint-Shop-Pro V6 instead of Photoshop.
It works pretty well once you get into the rhythm of working with a slower machine, and it's very stable too.
It's kind of an 'expendible' machine that I take to places where I would rather not take a more expensive one (camping etc.).
here in Brazil people just don't wory if their windows is legal or not.a ck.ISO !. and the rest have windows 98, also pirated, and we have no wories at all if any organization gonna come and start to charge the licences. cos that just dont happend, never heard of, only for governament and realy big companies.
here in the factory that i work for (mid size, almost 20 year of activit), there 12 computers, 8 have full Windows.XP.Professional.SP2.Intergrated.Xtras.rep