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Is Onlive Pirating Windows and Will It Cost Them?
An anonymous reader writes "When Onlive, the network gaming company, started offering not just Microsoft Windows but Microsoft Office for free on the iPad, and now on Android, it certainly seemed too good to be true. Speculation abounded on what type of license they could be using to accomplish this magical feat. From sifting through Microsoft's licenses and speaking with sources very familiar with them, the ugly truth may be that they can't."
Anyone who needs to run Windows-exclusive apps.
In other words, most businesses and their employees.
I would argue quite the opposite, most business and employees actually only need a small subset of the features that Microsoft's products have, and most of these features have been replicated or improved upon by free software.
Especially where Office is concerned.
Like Nokia they may have a special deal where Microsoft pays THEM per activated user
Funny story about that.
I recently bought a cheap Android China phone, supposedly based on the a MediaTek SoC. When it arrived, it had a slightly modified version of ICS, felt solid and well-made and ran very nicely, much more responsive than I expected from the specs. I decided to reflash the firmware to get a clean English-language install, but couldn't get it to load a new ROM.
To cut a long story short, I dismantled it and found a nice Snapdragon CPU and lots of HTC branding. Turns out it was one of the HTC HD7 Windows phones that nobody would buy, re-purposed as an Android phone. They're selling like hotcakes in Asia.
It'll be worth keeping your eyes open in a few months - there's likely to be a whole bunch of cheap Microsoft-subsidised reflashed Nokias showing up on the grey markets as well. They'd be good machines with a decent OS running on them.