Windows Vista Starter is designed for emerging home-computer markets, and it has two or three primary business models. Microsoft has already tested a pay-as-you-go business model in Brazil that allows people to buy a computer in installments. They put $200 or $300 down and bring home a new Vista Starter PC. To use it, they purchase cards in denominations like 20, 30 or 50 (which correspond to monetary units, such as dollars). The cards allow them to use the computer for so many hours. In this way, they pay off the computer and eventually own it once they've purchased enough cards. Microsoft and its partners, including AMD, are planning another test of Vista Starter for India in the near future.

1. Little originality, sometimes with a loss of elegance.

Everywhere you look, Microsoft has copied things that Apple has offered for quite some time in OS X. The User Account Control features, especially with the Vista Standard log-in, look a lot like Apple's user interface design. Too bad Microsoft doesn't let you lock and unlock things (leaving those settings permanent) the way Apple does. More than 15 years later, Microsoft is still following Apple in operating system design and bundled materials. With some notable exceptions (including IE7+, where it copied Mozilla, and the Windows Sidebar, where it bests Apple, Google and everyone in user-interface design), Microsoft is belaboring the point by reinventing the wheel, often with an overall reduction in productivity and usability.

I have no problem with Microsoft copying Apple's or any other company's best interface designs. We all win when that happens, and I wish Apple would steal the best things Microsoft does right back. What's really strange is when a company lifts good ideas and makes them worse, not better.