wooba.com - for your clicky finger

Hmm, $30 a copy for a legit, pathetically crippled piece of operating system, or $2 on the black market for the full functionality of Windows XP Professional Edition. Hard choice for those consumers in such Asian markets, no?
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Picture Bill Gates or any other senior Microsoft exec holding forth in a keynote about the limitless possibilities of ever-faster hardware, ever more powerful software. Then cut to this week’s Windows XP Starter Edition announcement and read “users can have up to three programs and three windows per program running concurrently. Further simplification of the operating system includes the display resolution set to 800×600 maximum 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.”

It’s cheap, it’s crippled, and if it’s a bid to convert Asian PC users from pirate copies of Windows, it’s surely futile. Microsoft announced Starter Edition as a five country, one year pilot to be tried out in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, and two more that have yet to be announced. It’s essentially a localised version with much of the useful stuff in XP pre-broken, and it will probably cost around $30

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/11/winxp_starter_edition_announced/