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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates used a speech in Beijing to introduce a number of new Microsoft philanthropic initiatives directed at developing nations. Attracting the most buzz was a bargain software package for students:
Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said it plans to offer a software package called Microsoft Student Innovation Suite for $3 to governments purchasing and giving Windows-based computer to primary and secondary students.
The software bundle, which will be available in the second half of 2007, includes Windows XP Starter Edition, Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Windows Live Mail desktop and other programs.
It’s not clear how many relevant governments have the wherewithal for extensive rollouts of PCs to students, but the thought is nice even if there is more to it than sheer altruism.
“This is not a philanthropic effort, this is a business,” Orlando Ayala, senior vice president at Microsoft’s emerging segments market development group in an interview before the official announcement.In many emerging markets, Microsoft has seen its software pirated and sold at a fraction of the price of a genuine product. Microsoft said the technology industry must also adapt business models to developing nations.
Case in point: the report at Newlaunches.com in which they quote the “Windows Vista chief distributor in Beijing” to the effect that:
However after 2 weeks (Jan 19 to Feb 2) from launch Microsoft managed to sell a mere 244 copies of Windows Vista. Software piracy is rampant in the middle kingdom and a pirated version of Vista sells for a mere $1 on the streets.
They have some nice box shots of pirated copies of Vista too and not unexpectedly, humorous comments abound at slashdot like “244 copies ought to be enough ….”
Charlie Demerjian at The Inquirer reports that Vista activation cracked by brute force:
IT LOOKS LIKE Microsoft’s unhackable OS activation malware has been hacked.
There is an active thread at the Keznews forums (account needed), and a summary on its main page about the crack.
It is a simple brute force attack, dumb as a rock that just tries keys. If it gets one, you manually have to check it and try activation. Is is ugly, takes hours, is far from point and click, but it is said to work. I don’t have any Vista installs because of the anti-user licensing so I have not tested it personally.
The method of attack has got to be quite troubling for MS on many grounds. The crack is a glorified guesser, and with the speed of modern PCs and the number of outstanding keys, the 25-digit serials are within range. The biggest problem for MS? If this gets widespread, and I hope it will, people will start activating legit keys that are owned by other people
It won’t take long for boxes bought at retail to be activated before they are bought, and the people who plunk down money for the mal^h^h^hsoftware for real get ‘you are a filthy pirate’ messages. Won’t that be a laugh riot at the MS phone banks in Bangalore.
As you can see there is a certain amount of schadenfreude amid the punditry. The full links are in the original article.
Update 3/4: Paul Miller at Endaget reports that the author of this “crack” now admits it was a hoax. The odd part is the number of people claiming to have found valid keys.
Since Vista shipped to businesses last year they’re a bit late, but today Microsoft announced the final versions of six Vista deployment tools for businesses:
Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of six new deployment tools that will help expedite businesses’ migration to Windows Vista™. The recently released tools are the Microsoft® Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007, the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.0, Windows Vista Hardware Assessment 1.0, the Volume Activation Management Tool, the Key Management Service for Windows Server® 2003 and Virtual PC 2007.
…
The tools being announced today can help customers at every phase of their migration to Windows Vista, including assessment, planning, testing and deployment. Many customers that already have been using pre-release versions of these tools along with earlier pre-release versions of Windows Vista now can move to the final versions to complete their deployment process.
We mentioned Virtual PC 2007 yesterday, but as for the others:
As would be expected these are all free downloads – follow the link for more details.
Some Microsoft news items from this week that didn’t find a post of their own:
Michael Gartenberg leaves Jupiter Research to become a Microsoft “enthusiast evangelist.”
More episodes of the Odd Couple: Microsoft, Novell Detail Their Linux-Windows Roadmap (press release here) but Ballmer: Novell deal proves open source needs to ‘respect IP rights’ and Novell CEO: We’re Going to ‘Attack’ Vista. I always enjoy light comedy.
Russian Judge Dismisses Any Penalty in Piracy Case. I’m sure Microsoft is glad to dodge the public relations bullet, but the rationale sets an odd precedent:
A Russian judge convicted a provincial school headmaster on Thursday for using pirated Microsoft software in school computers, but declined to impose any penalty, saying that Microsoft’s loss was insignificant compared with its overall earnings.
Microsoft comes under fire from BBC’s Watchdog programme over Xbox 360 defects.
VirnetX files VPN patent suit against Microsoft.
Microsoft Announces Microsoft Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation to Drive Business Intelligence.
MSN Soapbox, Microsoft’s YouTube clone, has shed it’s restricted beta for a public beta. I’m not kidding about the clone part – if you’ve seen YouTube, you’ve seen Soapbox except that the interface is slicker (i.e. more AJAX) and there are no ads.
A public release candidate of Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) was made available for download.
