tiebreaker," Wickstrand said. "She's really much more the expert than I am or my product managers are."
Another of Wickstrand's bellwethers is Manthana Upathe, a Thai woman who got her first PC through a Microsoft beta program for Windows XP Starter Edition.
"She doesn't want her 10-year-old son at an Internet cafe," Wickstrand said. "She wants her son at home."
What is "affordable"?
Wickstrand said that the limitations of
Starter Edition were of little concern to the testers. "If making a PC more
affordable means it doesn't have all of the bells and whistles, those tradeoffs
become very easy for (Manthana) to make," he said.
But some say that Microsoft is missing a key point when it assumes that buyers are willing to make those tradeoffs when buying a computer. Although a US$300 PC may seem cheap by U.S. standards, for the customers Microsoft is targeting, such a purchase could represent years of savings.
"If I am saving for months and months and months to buy a PC, and I want it to last for years and years," Gartner's Silver said. "I'm going to have outgrown Starter Edition long before I get rid of that PC."
In particular, Silver and other analysts bemoan the fact that there is no easy way to upgrade a computer to Windows XP Home or Professional. As it currently stands, those who want to upgrade must pay the full price for a copy of the full-featured OS. They then must completely overwrite their hard drive and reinstall all of their programs and data.
Silver said he hopes that Microsoft will create a smoother path with Longhorn, the next version of Windows due next year. The current version of Starter Edition, Silver noted, was largely an afterthought to Windows XP, created as a hasty response to a Thai government program to offer low cost PCs.
Wickstrand said that Microsoft considered doing more dramatic changes to Windows, even creating some prototype software that was designed to be easier to navigate. But in the end, Wickstrand said the team decided it was more important to keep the software similar to other versions of Windows.
"We want to enable and train tomorrow's information workers," Wickstrand said. "The best way to do that is to have a program that is still robust and still navigationally (similar to other versions of Windows)."
Microsoft hasn't said what it plans to do with Starter Edition for future versions of Windows.
The company's Starter Edition program is seeing the strongest response, Wickstrand said, is in places where the government or other entities are working to provide financing that can create whole new classes of potential computer owners. In Mexico, for example, Microsoft is partnering with Infonavit, a state-affiliate entity that provides mortgages to low- and middle-income households.
But Directions on Microsoft analyst Michael Cherry said that governments that go with Starter Edition may be missing an opportunity to do more than just create knowledge workers. Many governments have been drawn to Linux, he said, in part because it offers the promise that countries might be able to create their own software industry.
"It isn't about just learning Windows," Cherry said. For governments, "it's about how do we move from no use of computers to having people who someday could be writing software in our country."
Cherry suggested that one option might be for Microsoft to include some basic programming tools, such as its Visual Basic software, with the low-cost PCs. While coding might not be the most mainstream use of such computers, Cherry said it only takes a few people with good ideas to get things started.
"Five hundred people will look at the computer, and only one will get that spark. But that may be all these smaller countries need," he said.
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