Microsoft Steps Up To the Threat From RussianOS

Putin has great plans to ship out RussianOS, a national Linux based distribution, across all of Russia. Microsoft won’t sit still and watch this big market slowly vanish and therefore are taking an initiative to ship 200 000 windows based computers to Russian schools

It’s CNews.ru that reported about Window’s advances and plans on the Russian operating system market.

Microsoft in Russia has become allied together with Intel and Volnye Delo Fund with an agenda to double the amount of school computers in Russia.

Already next year, 200 000 new machines will be shipped and if the project is successful another shipment of the same size will be performed during the next four years. The experts state that at the present time there are about 700 000 computers found in Russian schools. And this means that Microsoft will more than double that figure.

The software on the machines will cost one fourth of the regular price for the licences, for Windows XP and Microsoft Office. According to some sources, the license will land on a cost of about $3 per machine.

This means that Microsoft will use the same strategy to meat the threat from open source in Russia, as they did to deal with the massive pirate copying in Kine - which is to work on a close level with authorities, subsidize hardware and push down the prices on software.

Source: linuxworld.idg.se

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