The Hindu : Business : Microsoft's new system to drive PC usage

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Thursday, Sep 30, 2004

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Microsoft's new system to drive PC usage

By Our Staff Reporter

— Photo: Rajeev Bhatt

The Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Dayanidhi Maran, unveiling the Microsoft new Windows XP Starter Edition with the Chairman, Microsoft India, Ravi Venkatesan, and the Managing Director, Rajiv Kaul (left), in New Delhi on Wednesday.

NEW DELHI, SEPT. 29. Aimed at making computer more affordable and within the reach of common man, Microsoft today unveiled its low-cost Windows XP Starter Edition operating system in Hindi specifically designed for first-time home PC users. The software, loaded in low-cost desktop PCs from leading manufacturers, will hit the Indian market in January next. Though the price of the package is yet to be decided but the company promised that it would come at a `significantly reduced' price as compared to the current edition.

Unveiling the new operating system here, the Union Communications and Information Technology Minister, Dayanidhi Maran, asked all major players in the information technology sector to pass on the benefits of cuts in duties and taxes announced by the Government to the consumers. This would greatly help improve the computer penetration in the country that was dismally low at two per cent, he asserted.

Urging industry leaders to join hands with the Government as well as social organisations to give a boost to e-governance as well as allow people to benefit from IT revolution, the Minister said there was a range of new areas that the country would have to focus on including hand-written script recognition by computers, speaker-independent speech recognition, universal machine translation, digital libraries and intelligent search and extraction of information from the Internet in India languages.

Informing about the new product, Ravi Venkatesan, Chairman, Microsoft Corporation India Pvt. Ltd., said the Starter Edition was a customised and localised version of Windows XP and would limit itself to running three programmes at a time. After Hindi, the company would come out with operating systems in five Indian languages within the next few months and within the next two years, the Starter Version would be available in 14 languages. "We are confident that his low cost, customised and localised technology solution will spur PC usage empowering a huge section of Indian population with the tools and skills they require to leverage IT revolution,'' he said.

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