India Presses Microsoft For Windows Discount in Wake of Cyber Attacks (reuters.com) 90
India is pressing Microsoft to offer a sharply discounted one-time deal to the more than 50 million Windows users in the country so that they can upgrade to the latest Windows 10 operating system in the wake of ransomware attacks, Reuters reported Friday. From the article: Microsoft officials in India have "in principle agreed" to the request, Gulshan Rai, India's cyber security coordinator, told Reuters over the phone on Friday. If Microsoft agreed to such a discount, it could open up the global software giant to similar requests from around the world. Rai said the government was in talks with Microsoft management in India. It is not immediately clear whether any other countries were seeking similar deals.
kindly do the needful (Score:1)
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Gulshan Rai is an idiot (Score:3, Insightful)
India has had EVERY opportunity to get off of Microsoft's garbage platform. Superior, FREE alternatives have existed for decades now. But instead, they chose to steal and pirate Microsoft's proprietary software, and now they want a bail-out. This makes me sick. Fuck Gulshan Rai and all of the asshole Indians who refuse to switch to Free and open source software. People have worked damn hard to create these alternatives to proprietary software—often the reasoning being that it is more accessible to those in the third-world—yet it's easier for them to simply steal. India deserves all of the ransomware it gets. Pricks.
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What? You write this as if 'India' is a customer.
'India' is a nation, millions of customers. I wonder how much of a discount would be needed to get them all to migrate to Windows 10, given the concerted campaign to malign Windows 10, warranted or not.
As if this is a pricing problem.
Re: Gulshan Rai is an idiot (Score:2)
Gawd that's stupid.
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LOL
Have you been watching How To Move To Canada (If Trump Becomes President) [youtu.be] @4:39 !
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Superior, FREE alternatives have existed for decades now
Well "decades ago", let's say year 2000, you had to do a lot of dicking around just to get simple shit like sound and wifi working on these free OSes. And half the time you couldn't get it right at all.
I will say that these days things have improved a lot in that regard. However if your #1 criterion for choosing an OS is the ability to run your custom applications, a free alternative that can't run them is hardly superior.
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Decades ago, most non-shit computers ran an alternative OS, matter of fact, Windows couldn't handle most proper hardware (NE2000, full 56k modems, SCSI) without serious dicking around.
Cheap computers with "free" Windows and proprietary drivers for even cheaper hardware is what got Windows to where it is. It had no security model, modems were soundcards, your CPU had to drive the hard drive (IDE) and peripherals (USB and even printers), and all that crap only came with Microsoft drivers and Microsoft activel
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IRQ or DMA conflicts were resolved with dip switches, jumpers and later on in BIOS.
ACPI came later and wasn't necessarily implemented well in either a lot of hardware, BIOS or in Windows so it caused a lot of problems around the era especially since some systems still came with an ISA bus, the 'only' solution in computers was to swap around the hardware slots until it worked (or only be able to use ~2 of the slots in your motherboard) or again, get proper hardware that allowed you to select an IRQ line.
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Everyone knows that Indians are like totally the best in the world at computers. Their own home-grown Linux distro is widely acknowledged to be the best in the world, beating RHEL and SLES on servers and routing all the Debian herbal varieties on deskies while being more flexible than Arch or LFS.
So why the heck didn't they install that?
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Probably because even in India, "they" encompasses lots of people who have computing needs beyond "ERMGFOSSBBQ."
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Re: Gulshan Rai is an idiot (Score:1)
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What? I remember a constant battle to prevent the bloody thing buggering up my Win 7 & 8 machines that were working fine. What are you smoking, and where can I get some?
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MS was only giving it away to existing Win7 and Win8 customers. The recent spat of malware that's been going around has been so horrible that MS has even had to issue patches for XP, suggesting that XP is still highly used and a round of cheap/free offers for all people (not just 7/8 users) would probably still be a significant benefit.
Of course, there's the issue of whether Win10 will run with anything approaching useful functionality on an XP-era PC. I'm sure there's a percentage of people who have stuc
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Reading around the lines, the government of India is after 50 million free corporate licences, they are not interested in the digital home invasion version of Windows 10, only the secure version which the public can not buy. Hence the negotiations. Which went along the lines of, either provide cheap secure corporate licences or we will cripple the privacy invasive version of windows 10, and require a secure version only to be in India. Basically every government can do the same thing and M$ will buckle beca
Re: Gulshan Rai is an idiot (Score:1)
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India has had EVERY opportunity to get off of Microsoft's garbage platform. Superior, FREE alternatives have existed for decades now. But instead, they chose to steal and pirate Microsoft's proprietary software, and now they want a bail-out. This makes me sick. Fuck Gulshan Rai and all of the asshole Indians who refuse to switch to Free and open source software. People have worked damn hard to create these alternatives to proprietary software—often the reasoning being that it is more accessible to those in the third-world—yet it's easier for them to simply steal. India deserves all of the ransomware it gets. Pricks.
The 'superior, free alternatives' that you describe assumes that a huge % of Indians are like Stallman, or /. whizzes who know how to tweak files in /etc to make their computers work. They DON'T! Computer education in India is nowhere near what it is here.
However, an increasing number of Indians do their internet on cellphones rather than PCs, and so the latter has lost a lot of its clout when it comes to India. Nonetheless, that doesn't mean Linux can take over. Maybe chromebooks can make headway, b
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Superior, FREE alternatives have existed for decades now.
Superiority is entirely based on your use case.
Dis Is Windows Calling... (Score:1)
Your computer have virus.
Windows 10 is still a free upgrade (Score:3)
At least it is for Windows 7 and 8.x - Microsoft offers it free for those that use "accessibility tools" - in other words, if you upgrade, run the screen magnifier once, and you've met the legal requirements for the free upgrade.
All of the mechanisms are still in place to activate the latest (Creator's update) Windows 10 installs using Windows 7 or higher keys. They'd be hard pressed to change this, since many upgraders will not have a valid Windows 10 key if they had to move to a new or used replacement PC system.
Quite frankly, Microsoft isn't that concerned about consumers still getting a free upgrade; the bread and butter for Microsoft has always been licenses on new laptops and desktops and, of course, licenses to businesses. Microsoft actually wants users to migrate, for many reasons, most of which are good for consumers.
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Except that in India, all Windows XP & 7 copies are pirated (dunno about 8). You can't upgrade a pirated Windows 7 to 10, and you can't upgrade XP to 10 w/o paying for it
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I'm sure Microsoft will consider the entire government of a country to be valid users of accessibility editions.
Well they would in the USA government anyway. Mental disabilities are still disabilities.
Lemme get this straight.... (Score:3)
"I see your free operating system. And I raise you waiting two years then complaining the price your charging is too high"
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This is presumably about getting people off XP or Vista, which never had a free upgrade path.
Re: Lemme get this straight.... (Score:1)
Time to put the nerd back in news that matters (Score:1)
"I see your free operating system. And I raise you waiting two years then complaining the price your charging is too high"
Have you ever done business in India? This move makes perfect sense to them.
The business culture in India is the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition [wikia.com] minus long term planning and the charm.
They were thinking:
Rule of Acquisition 11: "Even if it's free, you can always buy it cheaper."
Now they are thinking:
Rule of Acquisition 184: "A Ferengi waits to bid until his opponents have exhausted themselves."
Rule of Acquisition 34: "War is good for business." (or disaster in this case)
But what they forgot:
Rule of Acquisition
wow (Score:2)
This meal is awful.
And the portions are so small.
Classic India (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, this is a typical Indian move.
I am pretty sure that it is something which is woven into their culture.
I have several India firms as clients. Typically they are serving as an OEM for a larger US or EU brand, but they are responsible for getting all of the certifications ahead of time.
So, we give our standard offer. They say, no no no, that is WAY too much. Way more than your competitors.
We say, what are you looking for?
They say, it must be at least 40% less than this.
We say... OK, we can do 30% less, but we will not offer any support. If you do not know how to fix something, or fill out some form, then it's not our problem.
They agree.
Then, they fuck everything and demand support and extra support. I forward them the earlier emails and reminding them they agreed to no support and tell them that I would be happy to send out a new offer to include support at our standard list price. They decline.
Then for the next project, they ask for an even bigger discount because the support last time was not good. Every..fucking...time.
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Yeah, because that is the only option. Man, you are like one of those jack asses who hears someone complain about a policy of America that they do not agree with and says, "If ya don lik it... git out!".
In every line of work we are forced to deal with fucking morons and asshats. That's life. That doesnt mean that we need to like it or that we cannot complain about it.
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Actually, no.. we don't.
We do not actively market our service to anyone. There are very few companies who do what we do. Only 3 or 4 that I know of. The phone rings and we answer it.
As I mentioned to the previous poster, who unlike you was not such a little pussy that he needed to post under AC... Sometime we have to deal with assholes (like you) and that is life. But we are still allowed to complain about it. If you do not want to hear about it, stop reading and stick your finger in your ass.
oh no, Microsoft's worst nightmare (Score:1)
A vector for them to force their contribution to the mass surveillance drag-net onto millions of innocent people
Sure we'll do that if... (Score:2)
Sure we'll do that if give us a 20 year tax break on building new manufacturing facilities. Someone has to build all the wireless keyboards, mice, and Clippy Amiibos for the next Smash Bros. game.
I see you may need help doing that hadouken..
psst... (Score:2)
do you mind if we can upgrade all our pirated copies of windows? It would be nice to receive security updates again!
Re:psst... (Score:4, Insightful)
You say that as a joke, but MS really doesn't mind that much.
Of course they'd prefer if you pay, but if you refuse to do that then their 2nd choice is that you pirate their software rather than using somebody else'. If they're not getting money from you either way, then they may as well at least get the vendor lock-in and other such intangible benefits.
And these days especially, they would MUCH rather you use a free (whether pirated or given) version of Win10 than previous versions of Windows. Again, they aren't getting money either way so the intangible benefits are more critical. Particularly the fact that they can issue security patches and try to reign in some of the bad press they always get that isn't really their fault. Of course they also (rightfully) get plenty of bad press for things that are their fault, but its pretty hard to blame them for getting hacked if you're using a 15 year old OS (and they're apparently still able and willing to issue patches for XP when things get really really bad as we've see over the past few weeks.)
imagine (Score:1)
50 million (Score:2)