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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
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
"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 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.
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"
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.
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
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.