Three Dollar Bill

A piece in the New York Times is reporting that Microsoft is preparing to offer a three-dollar version of a bundle of common products -- Windows and Office, mainly -- in stripped-down editions.  That probably means the Starter Edition of Windows and Office Home.  Naturally people are skeptical -- $3 is still a lot of money in developing countries, and $3 vs. the $0 (potentially) of Linux and OpenOffice.org is stiff competition.  On the other hand, the $3 might be rolled into the cost of projects undertaken generally to bring computing to people in such areas, so they might not have to pay for it out of pocket.  That said, from all I've heard, Windows Starter Edition has been a dud -- $3 is about what I'd pay for something like that.  (On the bright side, maybe we can see a kind of charity sponsorship for classrooms in other countries: pay $10 to give this many students that much more software.  Such things already exist, I suspect, but this might help steer those normally inclined to pirate Windows away from doing so...)