Price Discrimination and Piracy (Score 5, Insightful)

Starter Edition sounds like a great example of legal price discrimination and turning a blind eye to piracy. Starter edition isn't exactly price discrimination. Price discrimination is when I charge a rich person $20 for a hamburger and a poor person $2 for the same hamburger, even though the hamburger cost me $1 to make. Why? Because I want all the money I can get from each person who can afford to pay. This is illegal. Starter Edition is not the same as Home or Professional, so it's not price discrimination, but the principal seems to be the same. Here's where the piracy comes in. Many people in California drive over the 65 speed limit on the freeway. In fact, you'll probably get honked at if you don't. You can even drive next to a cop at 75 with no problem. It's the unwritten law and what is expected. Publicly, Microsoft hates piracy, but to an extent, I believe they silently condone it. Here's why, and I'll use Adobe as an example. Some high school is playing with a pirated version of Adobe Photoshop at home. He can't afford Photoshop and none of his work is for profit or being sold. Adobe loses no money by his use of their product. Now, let's say he gets really good at Photoshop and some day goes pro. Either he, or his company, is going to buy Photoshop for him to use because 1) now he (or the company) has the money to make the purchase, and 2) it's the product that he knows. If he couldn't have pirated Photoshop back when he was a kid, he probably would have ended up using someone elses product and getting good at that. So, this type or piracy, though still illegal, is beneficial to Adobe. The real pirates they're trying to stop are the ones selling mass copies of their product. So this brings me to two, not necessarily exclusive, conclusions on Starter Edition. One) Starter Edition is a legal method similar to price discrimination to get any money possible from the Thais. Two) Starter Edition is a way to milk money from the piracy issue. People may buy this cheap OS instead of using Linux or pirating (because it's affordable). Then, having gained experience on the OS (similar to the high school kid with Photoshop) they will be more compelled to shell out for the full version than to switch to something they aren't accustomed to such as Linux. I feel the three application limit is not for simplicity, but to encourage an upgrade once the user gets used to Windows. An insightful poster earlier pointed out something good I hadn't considered that is relevant to piracy: This may simply be a Microsoft "tax" assuming that new computers come preloaded with Starter Edition. Even though the user is expected to install a pirated version of Windows anyway, they still payed a small increase for the system to be preloaded with Starter Edition.