Don’t Feed Their Cash Cow!

“Price-slashing” by monopolistic proprietary software companies masks the high costs customers still unwittingly pay. And when this false economy is endorsed by governments and industry leaders, the digital divide can only widen.

The Microsoft XP Starter Edition is a drastically abridged version of the Windows productivity suite. This slimmed-down, local-language product, which is to be sold with new systems in India and other developing countries, is expected to cost less than half of today’s basic Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition.

A somewhat disingenuous spin has been offered by supporters claiming that this new packaging represents a paradigm shift of availability and affordability. At around US $36, it is being projected as a tool to narrow the ever widening digital divide. Sadly, top government ministers and important industrial leaders have lent their weight and prestige to help sell this concept to a population that has yet to achieve full literacy or to acquire the requisite technical skills to question the wisdom of this approach.

Quite frankly, the true cost of bargain-priced proprietary software is a persistent widening and deepening of the cyber canyon. The canyon exists at multiple levels.

At the ordinary user level, even at half price, crippled proprietary software constitutes over 10 per cent of the cost of the cheapest computing systems. That’s hardly a bargain. Plus the Starter Edition is anywhere from 18 to 36 times more expensive than the street-smart, full-glory edition. But the real cost lies in being locked into an information processing and storage model that you cannot escape. Proprietary data formats and secret processing capabilities produce a captive cash cow that can be milked by an enterprising vendor forever. The lock-in that creates a cash cow for the vendor forms a jail for users trapped on the other side of the digital divide.

Moreover, when payment for any legitimate software is shunned, the attraction of official but crippled software diminishes. Users inevitably demand the latest, fanciest versions. Unfortunately, this will tie them to an economic system whose side effects poison the common well by promoting a gray market industry where corruption breeds corruption, software customization is impossible, and the government is denied sales tax revenues. Instead of promoting a digital revolution, a lurching cyber zombie is created. The inertia and legacy of a poisoned system discourages the realization that open technologies can lead to greater freedom of choice and more robust solutions, with no adverse side effects.

The cyber canyon dramatically widens at the top. It’s here, at the national level, that inaccessible and limited-use software stunts the growth of an indigenous technology industry. It prevents the nurturing of regional and global partnerships whose egalitarian collaboration can inspire everything from fundamental R&D to world-class products and high-margin services.

Government ministers and industry leaders in developing economies delude themselves whenever they promote software that costs anything more than US $0. Paying for commercial packages, even those that are artificially crippled, is simply not cost-effective when discretionary wealth is lacking. Constrained by ground realities, the vast majority of users have not even begun simple transactions, let alone the sophisticated office or organizational automation required to fully exploit complex commercial packages. Ultimately, the promotion of unnecessary proprietary software by governments and industry leaders encourages piracy because of cost, misuse, and the passive adoption of other people’s tools for the application of technology. Such negative dynamics serve only to perpetuate the digital divide.

Only a nation-by-nation open source software policy can begin to close the digital divide from the top. When user-friendly software with adequate functionality and no strings attached costs nothing, and when technologies endorsed by positive feedback and open, collaboratively built knowledge empower local developers and entrepreneurs, why not kick-start the local automation revolution with open source software?

The rich framework of open source software and methods provides the foundation for integration into a universal digital landscape. Otherwise precious resources are wasted on being locked into someone else’s cash cow.