Purchase Or Pirate?

Quite a few Chinese people, including me, were disappointed and even angered when Microsoft announced that it was going to lower the price of Windows XP in some east Asian countries, including Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, but not in China.

People in these countries, including China, are used to pirated Windows because the "real" Windows is just way too expensive. Lowering its price might help kick the habit. People don't steal when they don't have to.

If there is any country that needs this low price policy, it is China. I didn't understand why China should be excluded from this list.

Now I do.

It turns out that Microsoft is not lowering the price of Windows XP, but offering these countries another version of it, named "Windows XP Starter Edition". In SE:

• You can only run 3 programs at a time. That means if you have Norton Anti-virus and a ZoneAlarm personal firewall running in the background to protect your PC, you can only run one more program?Ridiculous.
• It doesn't support high-speed CPUs, nor RAM more than 256M. Imagine the unbearable slowness of being.
  
• 800x600 maximum resolution.
  
• No Microsoft networking. Want to share your DSL connection? No way.
  

In one word: rubbish.

A perfect example of a good idea ruined by greed.

Microsoft wants to tell us:"Sounds inadequate? Buy our Windows XP Professional to get a full experience!"

But I hear:"Feeling robbed? Buy a pirated Windows XP Professional to get full revenge!"