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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates arrived in Turkey yesterday and later in the evening had dinner at the Dolmabahce Palace with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan where he met local businessmen, promised continuing investment in Turkey, and announced that “he will ‘form a silicon valley’ in Istanbul.”
It looks like a full agenda including introducing the Turkish version of Windows XP Starter Edition, addressing 2,500 Turkish students coming from all around Turkey, and attending a Microsoft CEO summit. He also spoke to journalists about a plan to
… work with Turk Telecom and memory chip maker Intel to produce cheap computers under a programme called ‘My First PC’.
Gates said the version would have safeguards to stop children from reaching ‘inappropriate sites’.
The Microsoft chairman did not detail the computers’ retail price or say when they would be available.
There was no word as to whether they will be cellphone based. And, yes, there were some protestors with “Microsoft Go Home” signs.
(Via Mary Jo Foley) Greg Keizer at TechWeb:
Microsoft added two new versions of its bare-bones Windows XP Starter Edition Tuesday, one in Arabic for the Egyptian market, the other targeted at Turkey.
Starter Edition is a pared-down operating system that Microsoft introduced last year aimed at countries where piracy is rampant and incomes are low. Counting the new editions released Tuesday, Starter Edition is now available in nine languages and 32 countries.
The Arabic and Turkish versions will be distributed in partnership with the governments of Egypt and Turkey, respectively.
As I have observed before, the Starter Editions seem to be mostly a sop to 3rd world goverments as opposed to real players on the local IT scene. More interesting is:
Starter Edition is one of three initiatives Microsoft’s using to get its wares in developing countries. The others: Local Language Program (LLP) and Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher (MAR).
The Local Language Program allows Windows and Microsoft’s Office suite to be localized using “skins” that overlay the English-language code.
Details here and here, but LLP is for “less used” languages for which Microsoft currently does not provide localized product versions.
The four-year-old MAR program, meanwhile, has been expanded to include not only non-profit system refurbishers, but also governments and commercial computer refurbishers worldwide. As part of MAR, Microsoft lets refurbishers install licensed copies of Windows 98 Second Edition and Windows 2000 Professional — both now obsolete by Microsoft’s standards — on old computers destined for schools, charitable organizations, and non-profit organizations.
MAR details here.
Links: First multilingual version of XP released (actually first multilingual Starter Edition); Microsoft Offers English Windows in India; and (via Bink.nu) Microsoft to launch multi-lingual Windows XP Starter Edition:
New Delhi: Giving a helping hand to the Government, Microsoft Corporation has offered to provide tools for language-based computing which includes a new multilingual Windows XP Starter Edition among others to address the problem of digital divide in the country.This collaboration between them came up as part of a strategy aimed at supporting the Ministry of Communication and IT, after a series of discussions that took place this week at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters between the visiting Union IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran and Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation.
I continue to believe that the Starter Editions are mostly token PR offerings to placate Third World government bureaucrats rather than serious players in the local IT scenes or any kind of antipiracy balm. From the first link:
More than 100,000 copies of Starter Edition XP have been sold around the world to date.
