Microsoft's $3 anti-Linux weapon

Apr. 19, 2007

In Beijing, Bill Gates announced this week that Microsoft's "Unlimited Potential" initiative will now include offering a software package, the Student Innovation Suite, to governments and students in emerging countries across the world at a price of just $3.

This suite, available in the second half of 2007, will include Windows XP Starter Edition; Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Microsoft Math 3.0, Learning Essentials 2.0 for Microsoft Office, and Windows Live Mail desktop. However, Microsoft has no takers for its offering yet.

Officially, the goal is to help bring social and economic opportunity through new products and programs to as many as possible of the potential 5 billion people who do not yet use Microsoft products.

What a lot of bull feces. The goal is to kill open source off at its roots. Microsoft wants to make sure that young people in developing countries get brainwashed into the Microsoft way of computing.

Here's what's really happening. Microsoft is seeing that the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) initiative is taking off. Soon, millions of kids will be using a computer for the first time, and their first computer is going to be running Sugar, an innovative software environment built on top of a Red Hat Fedora-based Linux variant.

Microsoft is also seeing how Linux distributions are moving quickly ahead of Windows in Africa, where Ubuntu is gaining popularity; South America, where Mandriva is making inroads; and China, which has its own powerful ecosystem of Linux companies such as Red Flag and Sun Wah Linux.

As Ubuntu founding father Mark Shuttleworth recently told me: "We're seeing Ubuntu being picked up in Asia, Russia, Ukraine, and South America. So, those places have become a real focus for us." And, in particular, "Desktop Linux is very attractive in emerging counties."

Why? That's simple: Linux is inexpensive and it works. Unlike North America and, to some extent, Western Europe, the rest of the world isn't addicted to Microsoft's offerings. They can see with far clearer eyes than most Americans that Windows is not the be-all and end-all of operating systems.

Another factor is that in many countries, there's a real desire to not get tied up with Microsoft. After all, why help Bill Gates in the U.S. become ever richer, when you can help software developers in your own country create your own local version of Silicon Valley based on Linux and open source? You can see that in France, where the National Assembly recently moved to Linux desktops, and in South Korea, which wants to help its native software businesses.

For the first time since burying OS/2, Microsoft is all too aware that it has competition for the American desktop. Apple has emerged as a serious competitor once more, and I think the Linux desktop is really starting to worry the folks from Redmond.

Consider this: On April 18, Michael Dell, head of Dell Computers, the No. 2 PC vendor in the world with a market share of 15.2 percent, told the world that he's using Ubuntu Linux on his home laptop. Dell Inc. has also announced that it will soon be selling PCs and laptops with preloaded Linux.

Oh, and the number-1 PC company in the world, HP? It hasn't come out and said it, but rumor has it that it's readying consumer pre-loads of Linux on the desktop as well.

There was a time when hardware vendors announcing that they were going to sell and support any operating system except Windows would have been unthinkable. Microsoft would destroy them.

What? You thought Microsoft became number-1 because it had better products? Please!

Read, if you will, part of a 2006 complaint by Tangent, a Burlingame, Calif.-based OEM (original equipment manufacturer), about Microsoft's business practices: "Because Microsoft, through its exclusionary practices, eliminated its competitors from the market and has blocked entry of new competitors and expansion of existing rivals, it has been able to increase, maintain or stabilize prices at anticompetitive levels" since the late 1980s.

"Microsoft's supra-competitive prices are not the result of superior products or competition on the merits. Rather, Microsoft has been able, at the financial expense of purchasers to artificially inflate its profits...," the complaint added.

Amen, brother!

The people who run Microsoft aren't idiots. They see that they're losing any chance they might have of seizing the global PC market. They know that their iron grip on the North American and Western European markets is starting to rust.

So, by throwing almost free products on the world market, they're trying to ruin the chances of Linux and open source. If Linux continues to make gains in the U.S. and Canada, I expect that Microsoft may even -- oh, how it'll hate this -- cut the prices on Vista and Office.

I don't think, however, that Microsoft will get away with it. Dumping product is a no-no in any country's trade plans. Besides, a home-grown version of Linux, OpenOffice, and Thunderbird is still cheaper than Microsoft's $3 suite. People who don't live in places where Microsoft rules have also realized that, while the first taste of Microsoft products may be free, the long-term costs are enormous.

Last, but far from least, people everywhere are finally realizing that they don't need to buy into Microsoft's expensive monopoly to use their PCs. It's really quite simple: You don't need Windows anymore, and Microsoft is continuing to con you, and the rest of the world, into believing that you do.


-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols