In this week's installment of Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day, we give you-- Apeman Logic! Well, technically, we don't give it to you; Steve Ballmer does. But we're pleased as punch to act as the conduit linking you up to the finest rational thinking a rudimentary ganglionic brain-like mass of greyish matter can squeeze out without causing injury to the host. Are you ready, kids? Then strap yourselves in for a wild ride!

Here's the set-up: Steve Ballmer is speaking to a pack of tech execs at a conference last week, and somehow he gets onto the subject of software piracy, which he claims is a bigger headache to him than Linux, security holes, and tying his own shoes combined. Piracy, as you know, runs rampant in so-called "emerging countries" because people barely have enough money for the computers, let alone this invisible, intangible stuff you add to them to make them do things. Luckily for them, unlike hardware, software is infinitely replicable at no physical cost, so they copy the software ad infinitum and everybody lives happily ever after-- except for the software developers, of course.

So what's the solution? Stand back, kids, because Ballmer had an epiphany, and the first three rows may get wet: since people copy software because they spend all their available money on the hardware, all we need to end piracy overseas is (drum roll please) really cheap computers. How cheap? Try $100 cheap. Saith the Ballmer, "there has to be... a $100 computer to go down-market in some of these countries." Because if people can pay $100 instead of $400 for the hardware, then they'll have $300 left over, which they'll gladly give to Microsoft for the privilege of running Windows and Office. They certainly wouldn't pocket the cash and pirate the software anyway.

Meanwhile, what manufacturer is going to produce a PC capable of running current versions of Windows-- even cut-down ones-- that it can sell for $99 apiece without going broke in twelve minutes? Suppose Microsoft is volunteering? It's not totally out of the question, we suppose; the Xbox is close in specs and price at $149.99, although Microsoft takes a serious bath on each unit sold in hopes of making the money back on game sales. So far it hasn't worked; last quarter, the Xbox's division's operating loss "shrank by 47 percent" since last year, but it's still a loss. (We're not going to dig too deeply, but the loss for fiscal 2004 was apparently $1.2 billion, "slightly larger than its loss in the previous year." Must be nice to have pockets that deep just to try to crush a competitor.) So if Microsoft did go the $100 PC route, it'd be losing real money on hardware in hopes of losing less potential money on software; now that's a strategy for the ages.

Oh, wait-- never mind. Apparently it doesn't matter what poor sap would make these $100 computers just to pad Microsoft's software revenue, because the Ballmer then pointed out that poor people aren't blowing $400 on the hardware in the first place: "PCs are not selling to the lower end of the population in China and India. People buying machines are relatively affluent." So if the poor people don't have computers, it sounds just a leetle unlikely to us that they're pirating software. And if it's the richer people who are pirating warez for their computers, how exactly does a $100 computer help? Answer: it doesn't. The Man with the Plan says: "So... should the prices be lower? Not really. Until government and situational factors reduce piracy... those people... don't pay."

So why was he blathering on about $100 PCs in the first place? We have no idea. Don't think about it too hard; just smile and back away slowly.