Microsoft will sell $3 software to developing countries

In what initially sounds like an altruistic gesture towards developing nations -- but is in reality a shrewd business move to both compete with pirates and get kids hooked on Windows -- Microsoft will be selling a package containing full-fledged versions (well, kinda) of its OS and office software to eligible countries for a mere three-bucks-a-pop. Starting sometime in the second half of the year, less-developed nations that agree to provide free computers for their school systems will be able to participate in the latest effort in Microsoft's Unlimited Potential initiative, which nets them a bundle containing XP Starter Edition, Office Home and Student 2007, as well as various other educational titles (fingers crossed for Flight Simulator). Of course, by putting this restriction on participants, Microsoft is obviously forcing them to purchase PCs that work with its ecosystem of products -- and more importantly, that aren't the OLPC XO (Classmates are cool, though). The company will also benefit somewhat from governments that tend to buy their software from shady sources, although pirates can rest assured that they'll still be able to thrive on the patronage of individuals and private firms. So make no mistake about it, the war for the hearts and minds of the next wave of PC users is most definitely on, and while Bill Gates may espouse the many societal benefits of bridging the digital divide, Microsoft's Orlando Ayala made the company's intentions crystal clear when he told Reuters "This is not a philanthropic effort: this is a business."

[chris.ismael @ Apr 20th 2007 1:41AM]

Philanthropy or not, $3 is a damn good deal to get people into technology, legally. I see nothing wrong with that.

[2Perfect @ Apr 20th 2007 1:59AM]

Good deal. Err why don't they just give it away for free then? Selling it for that cheap is basically saying "we've made enough profit but a little bit more won't help. 3 bucks it is."

Of course giving it out for free would enrage a lot of people. Anyway, it's a good start.

[Danimal @ Apr 20th 2007 2:09PM]

Maybe they can't by nature of licensing agreements or 3rd party contract to bundle licensed IP with a free product.

[Chris @ Apr 20th 2007 12:00PM]

wonder how much of this is pushed by big software vendors? "if OSS systems take hold in the global market, we'll start coding for Linux and not windows." Or maybe MS just fears that happening. If Adobe and Autodesk start porting everything to Linux, MS will loose some serious marketshare really fast. Illustrator and AutoCAD are the only 2 software packages that keep Windows on my sales teams PC's.

[melloncollie @ Apr 20th 2007 7:35PM]

Autodesk software on Linux would be a god send to me.
As an architect I need to use the software they provide, but it's Windows only software and that reason alone has kept me from being a permanent Linux user.

[zorg @ Apr 20th 2007 12:00PM]

Question:
When did a profit-minded business become a bad thing?
Answer:
When its purpose is to suffocate a real effort to help
children, masquerading as helping children.

By the way, Travis, if you weren't a total idiot, you might have easily dug up countless examples of profit minded businesses screwing third-worlders, such as Nestle's relentless struggle to convince third-world mothers to use their products, even if it forces them into unsafe practices because they can't afford to boil apparatus.

But then, you'd have to be something other than a total idiot to investigate and understand that untrammelled globalism crushes the weak. Nevermind. Go back to your "might is right" blathering.

[anonymouspimp @ Apr 20th 2007 12:00PM]

I think this is a really generous thing for Microsoft to do.

I swear, only an engadget writer could find a way to make this look like a bad thing.

So what if they are Microsoft... they are probably just trying to find a way to cover their expenses. But yes, it is a brilliant move to get kids and adults in 3rd world countries hooked on Windows. And what is so wrong with that? The rest of the world is hooked on Windows, why should they be any different?

[dosguy @ Apr 20th 2007 12:03PM]

Is the USA on Microsoft's list of "eligible" countries? There's an awful lot of kids right here at home who's parents can barely afford rent, food, and medicine, let alone Windows.

[Error404 @ Apr 20th 2007 12:12PM]

You know the old sayin... "You get what you pay for". Well, imagine the $300+ you paid for your flavor of MS O/S, and think about all those bugs, er... I mean "undocumented features" that came with it; And now these people are paying 1/100th of that...
.
.
.
.
Hey, if the feature to price ratio is linear; then these peeps r gonna get 1/100th the amount of "undocumented features"!

[mikebhp @ Apr 20th 2007 12:12PM]

3 dollars for software sounds really cheap, but when you are making less then a dollar a day and less then 300 dollars a year, the price is proportional, and in face even more expensive in a lot of cases.

[kingofwale @ Apr 20th 2007 12:13PM]

here's a question... if they can sell them for 3 dollars. why do we still have to pay over 500 dollars for Windows and Office?

are you telling me there's NO WAY they could lower that price just a little? Frankly, this just pushes people even in the developed country into piracy or open sourced software. Face it, nobody wants to pay more than they have to. and frankly, 500 is WAY too much.

[Ihar `Philips` Filipau @ Apr 20th 2007 12:28PM]

$3 sounds like good deal - compared to $0 of XO or plain Linux.

Though, since for XP you would need relatively good computer, I do not really think that $3 is right figure to compare to Linux.

Especially in developing countries, old computers from US/EU are refurbished and sold for some little money. Can second hand Pentium II with 64MB RAM run WinXPsp2? I very much doubt it. But with Linux it takes only a day to find some slim distro - e.g. Xubuntu based on Xfce4 - which would happily run on "trash" (in our understanding) like that.

So saying that "$3 - $0 == $3" is too miss the point that software is bound to hardware. And few in developing world can afford new computer which would be required for the $3 offer.

[Miguel @ Apr 21st 2007 3:25AM]

When I first got XP, I was using an old Compaq Presario running Win98SE with an off-brand processor (Cyrix M2) and 64MB of RAM. It ran through WinXP/SP2 until the hardware on it went haywire (BSOD galore). So, yes, a properly maintained "trash" system can indeed run XP/SP2. I was, alas, young and foolish at the time and did not know what "properly maintained" meant in the computer world. A good refurb would run XP no problem.

[Jork @ Apr 20th 2007 12:29PM]

"This is not a philanthropic effort: this is a business."

Then either Microsoft software is only worth $3, or this is predatory pricing designed to exclude competitors from the market. Either way, Microsoft proves they are scum.

[Oliver M @ Apr 20th 2007 1:28PM]

Erm, perhaps you should do some research into product markets / how business works before making such statements. Companies don't exist to be kind. They survive by pricing their products at a price the market will tolerate.

Regarding the 'worth' of Microsoft products to people in the third world: Frankly, MS products are 'worth' $3. These people probably aren't going to be able to use MS Word etc.. to generate anywhere near the amount of cash that American / European etc.. users can. It's about proportionality, basically.

ANY business would love to exclude competitors from their market - if there was only a tiny amount of air left in the world, I'm sure you, Jork, like me, would rather have it to yourself.

Let's also remember that Microsoft's profits are a pretty good thing. Google 'the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation' to find out why...

[me and enzo rolling in the benzo @ Apr 20th 2007 12:49PM]

fingers crossed for flight simulator??

Do you really want young al qaeda practicing slamming into buildings with the 747 in that game?

[S. Brown @ Apr 20th 2007 2:52PM]

Very bad taste.

[James Smith @ Apr 20th 2007 1:08PM]

M$ is just doing this cause they see the impending threat that OS's like Ubuntu pose to them. In South Africa, Ubuntu was helping setup free school computer labs for poor schools and what does M$ do? The same thing. M$ realizes that a lot of third world countries will one day develop into industrialized nations. Now if Ubuntu gets popular now, when these countries develop, they will all be using Ubuntu and M$ won't be a global standard. So M$ is willing to give they're crap away at a loss just so they can spread they're shit all over the developing world. But free always beats $3 so I don't take this as a serious threat to Linux.

[Major Malfunction @ Apr 20th 2007 1:18PM]

*hugs his new Ubuntu box and Open Office while giving the evil eye to his completely botched Vista box*

I'm telling you, Vista bites the big churro. Every damn copy operation takes forever, countless moments of stuck machine while the system inventories every file, my firewall keeps popping because its constantly pinging out to do various upkeep efforts for some reason.

Please! Keep up the good work Ubuntu. Now, to get schools onto some *nix distro so I can send my files without a professor freaking out that it isn't in Word!

[Mike @ Apr 20th 2007 1:19PM]

This is a total over generalization and hardly an appropriate analogy: It is almost like giving cigarettes to children. Get 'em hooked while they're young and impressionable!

What Microsoft is doing is a near brilliant move. They're making the assumption that Windows will be used to some extent regardless due to the rampant piracy that occurs in "these" nations. What they're doing is giving people an easy switch to make them legitimate. What happens when the become legitimate users at that price? Microsoft is probably hoping that they can then keep them there (perhaps at small price increases) as more and more people adopt their software. By getting it into schools and having many people "exposed" to their software it will become more and more likely that those people will continue to come back to Microsoft even if their prices increase ever so slightly. Those same people who are now Microsoft's customers will be loyal in the same sense that you see people today. Most people are not ready to move from Microsoft software because that is what they know and they know what they know (know what I mean?). It will be a lot harder for someone who has known one type of software for their entire "learning years" to switch to something else. They're more likely to stick with what they know (Microsoft).

I'm not saying this is an absolute or that it will happen. I'm commenting on the observation that Microsoft is aiming to keep people coming back to them by getting them hooked at an impressionable age.

Either way it worked for the tobacco industry.

[KC @ Apr 20th 2007 1:26PM]

$3 includes the cost of the CD, distribution and support. You can't really compare that with a free linux distro like ubuntu. Where the hell would someone living in a hut can afford to have broadband to download and burn that ISO into a CD?

Kudos to Microsoft. I think they are doing the right thing.

[saboola @ Apr 20th 2007 2:17PM]

Using that same logic I would imagine someone "living in a hut" would have bigger concerns than what operating system their computer is running. Maybe like that whole getting clean water and proper medical aid.

[Vixis @ Apr 24th 2007 9:22AM]

There are currently Ubuntu shipit program https://shipit.ubuntu.com/, they are sending CDs with Ubuntu(Kubuntu, Edubuntu) absolutely free of charge to any place.
So you need only postal office somewhere near your hut.

From microsoft.com:
With Windows XP Starter Edition, first-time home PC users can have up to three programs and three windows per program running concurrently. Further simplification of the operating system includes setting a maximum display resolution of 1024x768 and no support for PC-to-PC home networking, sharing printers across a network or more advanced features such as the ability to establish multiple user accounts on a single PC.

The best new feature is cap of 3 application running at once.

[chazzzzy @ Apr 20th 2007 1:27PM]

And when they stop supporting XP next year... time to upgrade!

[Ben H @ Apr 20th 2007 1:42PM]

Zorg get your head out of your ass and look around you, globalization has been happening for some time now and it was not caused by microsoft, so in fact YOU are the idiot for not recognizing that. I realize that your fanboyism has blinded this fact from your eyes. I realize that you love your pink iPod, but take it out of your ears and go to school moron.

[cs32 @ Apr 20th 2007 1:47PM]

This posting allows you to pick out exactly who are the irrational MS haters are. We have people calling MS scum, people whining that they are not getting their software for $3, because they are afraid of other OSes, that once Illustrator is ported to Linux then it means the end of MS (If somebody cannot pay $100 for an OS, how are they going to pay the $1540 for illustrator?) - all because Microsoft tries to help out some poor kid in an impoverished country. As an american who grew up in housing projects, worked hard to put myself through college, worked hard to get good grades, got a good job - in one brief moment I realize why everybody hates us. It is not because of political reasons, it is because most of the people in this country are spoiled little brats, including the authors of this web site.

We want it, we want it now, and we want it on our terms. If they charge $100 for software, then we will copy it claiming that it is too expensive and until they lower the price it is our right to copy it. When they do lower the price, it is not at the price that I want so I will copy it. When they lower the price to $3 for some people who do not make much money, then they are cheating us, and so we can copy it. If the price is $3, then Jesus F-ing Christ they must lower the price to $0, because I said so, and then I will copy it because I want to.

Bunch of pansy-assed, whining, greedy, ignorant people.

[TIMMAH! @ Apr 20th 2007 2:18PM]

How do we get the US classified as a 'developing country'? I'd sure like to get that OS package for $3 (I may even buy 2...)

[dosguy @ Apr 20th 2007 3:11PM]

If you can't say "nappy-headed hos," then you sure as heck can't say "hell" unless you want to end up standing behind Imus in the unemployment line.

[Magallanes @ Apr 20th 2007 5:01PM]

For some fanboys :every step of Microsoft is a sin, every action do by linux is good for all humankind..

Anyways, a cheap software is always a good thing, even if it's a crapped and limited version only.

The downsize is to buy a new pc, since you can buy a old-but-still-functional pc by less that $100 (incluying monitor, keyboard and such).

[nick @ Apr 20th 2007 10:33PM]

The skepticism of this article rings so loud, I can hear it from my living room. This is neither new for any business to involve itself in a public relations offensive. I commend Microsoft, I think it's a good business move.

Any means of trying to disable or slow down these crooked pirates is OK by me.

[Rajan R @ Apr 21st 2007 1:19AM]

Well, I don't know about Linux. Writing textbooks about dealing with things like dependency hell is hard in Hindi.

But that aside, does anyone else think that cheap computers should not be on the list of priorities in educating poor, third-world children? Maybe spending that money on teacher training? Physical school facilities? Stationary?

[Ihar `Philips` Filipau @ Apr 21st 2007 3:36AM]

And why would anyone engage in such masochistic act???

I used WinNT4.0 with 8MB RAM - and I actually did work on the system. But it doesn't mean that was "good" or even "good enough". Because brand new Linux (Slackware 3) run on the system perfectly fine - "snappy" as it was commented by my friend.

WinXP lets you see that your system is "trash". Linux can get easily best out of that trash - and really show that 200MHz+64MB are pretty good stats for many tasks.

[Travis @ Apr 21st 2007 11:11AM]

Good for them. When did a profit-minded business become a bad thing?

[Wontoncookie @ Apr 22nd 2007 6:43AM]

Bill Gates is doing it again ? Lets get 3 dollars instead of letting them pirate .
Oh by the way your country is no longer developing , no you must pay full price.
Is this going to be the biggest bait and switch ever.
Sorry for my poor english but I was not raised by Bill gates foundation.

[Spencer Ferguson @ Apr 22nd 2007 7:24PM]

Win/Win! Inexpensive software for those in need, and great marketing for Microsoft!

SF
http://www.wasatchsoftware.com

[KC @ Apr 24th 2007 2:08PM]

Cool. Those kids can learn how to dual-boot, and get the bost of both worlds! =)

[KC @ Apr 24th 2007 2:09PM]

bleh. *best of both worlds*

[Fish @ Apr 28th 2007 5:09PM]

I think that the logic behind this action is very clear.

In Russia (don't know about elsewhere), a pirated copy of ... anything costs about $4/disc.

By selling their software at a price that is comparable to the black market price, they can encourage people to spend their money on the legal version (presumably because of the promises of extra stability and lack of hassle that Microsoft's anti-piracy campaigns drone about).

If this is successful, it will starve the pirates of income, causing them to go out of business or, at least, to stop selling Microsoft products.

I don't believe it can work. It would work, if all the pirated discs were being sold by one large monopolistic entity, that only sold Microsoft discs (a kind of DarkMicrosoft). Then it would be difficult for it to re-enter the market and win back their customers.

Of course, this isn't true.. there are nearly no barriers to entry to selling pirated discs, and existing pirates sell everything from movies and music to operating systems and applications (typically bundled several hundred to a disc).

If customers start purchasing legal $3 copies of Windows, they will still go to the pirates to get everything else they need for their computer. If Microsoft's price goes up to $20, the pirates can just start selling the pirated copy again. In fact, this is market economics at work, with a perfectly inelastic supply (of pirates who can turn a profit at 30 cents a disc), and a very elastic demand (of consumers who aren't willing to pay more than $5 or so for their software)