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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?"
The Brazilian government has launched an initiative called "PC Conectado" (Connected PC), via which it hopes to sell up to one million computers (each costs $300 - $400 U.S.) to lower-middle income Brazilians this year. The cost of the PCs will be partially subsidized by the government.
I wonder if MS can justify $400 million to secure 1 million Brazilian users. They might as well pay for the PCs with pre-installed Windows OS free of charge.
Is this excessive even by MS standard?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Features cut from the various Starter Editions have included support for multiple user accounts; networked printers; the ability to personalize desktops with multiple looks and feels for different users; and support for screen resolutions above 800 X 600 DPI (dots per inch). Starter Edition also prevents users from launching more than three applications simultaneously.>
I didn't realise the Starter Edition was so crippled. I would consider that barely useful!
first they give you a free hit, sooner or later your hooked on the stuff.
serenity now!
If it didn't work in Asia, why would it work in Brazil?
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
Brazilian people already don't pay for windows. Do they really think they'll start paying for a crippled version of it? Right on Microsoft. Right on. I for one, wouldn't use it.
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
Sure, maybe, maybe some people just use Starter Edition for a while, then realize its limitations and decide to upgrade. If they can hardly afford a $300 computer, will they really be able to afford a $260 OS upgrade? Chances are, they'll talk to everyone about how they need an upgrade, until the kid from city hears about it and comes along with a CD-case full of cracked Windows CDs and installs it for $10.
$200 million to secure the *FIRST* 1 million users.
paintball
see, they have already recovered development costs,
/. is the borg?
probably 10x over.
if they sold the professional edition for $10 they STILL MAKE MONEY.
So, now they insult users by stripping it down, which is NO DOUBT going to cause 1/2 the software out there to BREAK, then sell it for something like $50-$75 anyhow!
This is a SLAP IN THE FACE.
Why do you think the icon for them here on
All the money that bill and his wife supposedly give away, but they cant donate a goddamn copy of windows to some poor family just KILLS ME.
M$ can ROT IN HELL.
There would be no extra cost for Microsoft to sell them the full version for the same price. And they would be far more competitive with Linux if they did.
The only reason to sell a crippled version is to not undermine the market in the rich countries.
If they sell the same version for a substantially lower price MS will have a hard time explaining that difference.
I guess that this is obvious really.
But even if it is obvious, when you think about it, I believe it is enough of a smoke screen for people in rich countries to not question the prices of the full versions of Windows.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
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.
Warning...troll on a karma raising mission.
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Ford follows suit and announces a cheaper mustang for Brazillians that has a big hole in the floor that operates ala Freddy Flintstone..
And this doesn't even take distribution of wealth into account. According to the above mentioned source 25% of Brazil's population are below the poverty line. In reality, it's much more (they are notorious for not keeping track of economical data or even just plain making stuff up).
So you have a small upper class, a small middle class, a huge blue collar working class (with many people out of work) and a lot of people unaccounted for.
If you're living on $741 a month, do you really spend $36 on a license you essentially don't need (since there's no enforcement in Brazil). Also, consider that those $36 are 20% of your monthly income (not of your monthly disposable income).
I don't really get who the folks at Microsoft think their target audience is. The upper class can afford XP Pro/Home licenses. They've either already purchased those (probably OEM licenses) or simply don't care. Anyone outside that demographic just won't be able to afford a Starter license, even if they wanted to.
Great idea! Bet they sell dozens of copies.
How is your situation different from the guy who figured it would be good to sell MS Starter Edition in Brazil?
In countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, & Malaysia (the countries listed in the article, and I've been to three of them), you buy your software for $2 from a guy who burns CDs at the local Internet cafe. Microsoft says this is for the first time user, but it's really for the government and big corps who are actually concerned about whether they follow licensing rules. Microsoft's strategy for developing countries is to go: govt-> multi-national company->local company->middle class individual->everybody. They're still on the govt step.
Tristan Yates
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.
Annoy a Conservative...
Could the pressure of Brazil's overtures toward Linux be forcing Microsoft Brasil to compete?
You call a crippled OS that can only run three foreground apps at once competition? They're going to be laughed out of every government office they set foot in.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
You got that one wrong - new strategy seems to be less for more, not less for less.
What's the problem with that? I run my 21" LCD at 1600x1200 and that's just a bit over 80x60DPI. This thing has ten times the reslolution of my system!
What? The article author is clueless about technology and just spouted some jargon? Come on, let's give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she uses a 1" screen.
-Ryan C.
... people buy software in Brazil? Since when?
I'd bet it is worth more to Microsoft to give away Windows to every Brazillian for free than to lose some business by pricing it too high, if they could only do one or the other.
Like this one or this one? It's not that much of a stretch to get a cheap box, even with the disgustingly expensive Windows on it.
If you're a foreign government and you're running everything on MS then your entire infrastructure is being controlled by a foreign power. Doesn't matter how well MS wants to play it is already at a disadvantage in that regard.
Microsoft doesn't expect anyone to buy this. It is a statement. They are releasing this to show that competition with linux does not result in a superior product. At the same time releasing this to compete with linux is a way of insulting linux, implying that linux is crap.
And last but not least, they are releasing this so they can claim that their pricepoint is fair. They will claim that this is all they can offer at these rock bottom prices because software developments costs... etc. etc. etc. We all know how huge their profit margins are on windows so we know it's a load of crap. On the other hand it is not entirely... it looks good on paper to beurocrats who do not use the software themselves, they hope people will turn around and buy full versions, and Microsoft doesn't just have to make huge profits. They have to meet or exceed ANTICIPATED profits that are based on their previous ridiculous earnings or their stock will drop and that hits the top dogs pocketbooks.
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.
I for one think this is a very useful product. A) Buy and install XP Starter Edition. B) Download required fully functional OS using Bit Torrent. C) Burn to CD, format and install.
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
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
---
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
------
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"
How much would you bet that Microsoft would prefer if people got pirate versions of Windows "Less-Crippled Edition" instead of trying, say, Linux?
I know I would, if I was in their shoes.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
svchost,
:P
services,
winlogon
hmmmm.. no explorer
hmmm... dumb...
Yeah, you can't forbid importing a product from one area to another. Doctrine of First Sale in the USA and quite a few other laws, in the USA and abroad, prevent this. What you can do though, is make something useless anywhere but where you sell it, and by pursuing needlessly harassing and expensive lawsuits, drive anyone without billions of dollars into the ground for trying to exercise their lawful rights.
Microsoft is trying their damndest to put me out of work by bribing politicians into banning open source (they've asked that OSS be banned - if they'd asked earlier they might have succeeded) and costing the world economy billions by sticking useless middleman costs onto all information processing. They didn't design the web, they didn't design any of the protocols we use, and they didn't add any value to any of the above, yet they claim to have invented modern computing and put a computer on everyone's desk - as if the innovation to charge ruinous lock-in rates is what sped adoption.
Fuck Microsoft for doing it, and fuck the MPAA for giving them the idea.
How can we cost Microsoft money? Anything from mailing them a brick in a prepaid envelope to hiring some Russians to hack in and wipe everything they can touch? Anything less is letting them win with their bribes and outright criminal actions.
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.
Why do you think DVDs are generally region-coded?
Brazil: A country that uses proprietary software with hidden file formats is not an independent country. This is particularly true when considering software from the United States. The U.S. government spends a huge amount on spying on other countries. Some of the spying is done to benefit U.S. companies to allow them to compete with foreign companies.
Brazil: Do you want to be a partner of a company that has broken the laws of its own country? If that company has in the past shown little respect for the laws of its own country, would it respect the laws of Brazil?
Brazil: Remember that hidden elements of the U.S. government supported the military coup against democracy in Brazil, without the knowledge of most U.S. citizens.
If Microsoft does indeed have monopoly power (e.g., they face a downward sloping demand curve) then they would maximize their profits by price discrimination. Price discrimination means charging each group of customers the maximum amount that they are willing or able to pay for the product or service. This is the winning strategy for any monopoly assuming that they are not legally restricted from price discriminating. Thus, this type of behavior by Microsoft is not surprising, but rather entirely expected as per the textbook examples of unrestricted monopolies.
The celeron processors have a smaller L2 cache than their equiv pentium processor. L2 cache being SRAM is expensive to produce, so removing it (well, actually, not producing it on the chip in the first place) actually reduces the production cost.
From what I remember of the 486SX/DX thing, the DX had an on-chip FPU but the SX didn't - or in fact the SX did, but due to manufacturing process, the FPU was damaged and so disabled. So they either sell them for less, or they bin them.
This is totally different from stripping out/disabling parts of code from a piece of software (which costs extra for MS to do).
-2A
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
i live in a small country in northern europe, we aint exactly poor but we earn usually less money here than the european and american workers that have the same job.
most here people dont buy windows here, they use some pirate version or have chosen linux instead. cause they just can't afford to spend money on software. besides the local people here really have no respect for software as a product.
russia is right beside us, people there earn even less. bill gates in his wildest dream can't sell no windows starter edition over here (they have launched it there, but believe me, there is no progress on selling there). i wouldn't wonder if their government would use pirated versions of microsofts tools too.
brazil is somewhat on the same level of economy as russia. a big country, and no money whatsoever (at least on the hands of microsoft's target group).
if you give a brazillian a choice to buy a limited windows version, pirate a windows version or use linux, he will choose one of the two last, no doubt about it.
none is really interested in buying a limited version of windows in a country where a solid worker earns the fee of window's licence in 1-2 months.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
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
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 $2.00 Pirate XP Pro.
Microsoft has received their money for XP Starter already. I doubt at that point they really care if they go and pirate XP Pro. Even if they put Linux on it, they're still paying the Microsoft tax when they buy a new PC.
This idiot 'redswinglinestapler' is copying comments from previous articles and posting them verbatim. Please add to your foes list and mod the shithead into oblivion whenever you get the chance.
Example, here's a comment I posted.
Spot the difference
For more incriminating evidence check out the user page
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
error 666 god is unavailable to reply to messages at the moment as heaven's 2003 server is being rebooted.
This idiot 'redswinglinestapler' is copying comments from previous articles and posting them verbatim. Please add to your foes list and mod the shithead into oblivion whenever you get the chance.
Example, here's a comment I posted.
Spot the difference
For more incriminating evidence check out the user page All of this user's comments have been plagiarised.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
screen resolutions above 800 X 600 DPI (dots per inch).
On my 17" monitor that would be a resolution of 10400 x 6000.
I think they could have left the "DPI" out.
Lift out of order. Bubble sort in progress.
Just a little thought here: After reading all about this linux vs. win there is so much more you get from a linux distribution, and I'm not talking about the down-to-core os-tools, but the applications that you can ship with the os, like free office applications, good web browsers, image editing and so forth and so on. Windows is just crap without a ton of other software downloaded or bought, with an own linux distribution you can distribute a complete pc-home-work-machine, not a dumb terminal that needs external software to be really useful (m$ paint anyone? :)
As a brazilian citzen, I can say a word or two about our average computer user... They're clueless, as any other computer illiterate in the world. So, if it's not crippled for GAMES most users won't notice the difference.
Also, most of the users use whatever OS that came with their machines. I don't know of any home user that bought a LEGAL copy of Windows to update.
This "Windows Starter Edition" wont do any good for Microsoft here. The home user is already using Windows, so sales wont grow up. The small business are using Linux SERVERS, not desktops... so thei're attacking the wrong front here. And, finally, the governament is commited with OpenSource.
It would be a lot better if they created a "Microsof Office Start Edition" to fight OpenOffice. This is what is really driving people to Linux Desktops around here.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
This computer is more near R$1.400 (US$540) than US$1.400. And I am taking into accout pieces bought on legitimate stores (that pays the importation tax) at Nort East region, that spends a big deal on transportation.
Rethinking email
Brazil, if you're listening, REGAIN your freedom and independence. (...)"
Sorry, God is unavaible at the moment. But his substitute has already dealt with this. You see, the Micromind proposal for shipping the "Connected PC" with its Windows X-tremelly Poor Sucker Edition was already rejected by the Brazillian government. I'm sorry I don't have an English link, but you can use the fish.
I can, however, translate the words of Sérgio Amadeu, director of the Federal Data Processing Service (SERPRO):
- Please, ignore everything written above.