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Comment by nevi-me | Hacker News Reader

It continues to suck how African countries are excluded from these product launches and from many products in general.

Microsoft has enough partners and regional offices because Office365 and Azure are the only worthy products for us in "shithole countries".

If Microsoft isn't intending on selling a lot of these devices, the cost of adding 1 or 2 African countries would be relatively small compared to the revenue they make from our regions.

I mean, expensive Macs came out, costing twice the shitty HP/Lenovo/Dell enterprise offerings with poor thermals and battery life. We bought them.

I would buy this device if it was for sale in my market, I see a benefit in testing my work on Windows ARM64.

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>It continues to suck how African countries are excluded from these product launches

All South American, most Asian and most European countries are excluded. That sucks, too.

Do we have any sense of how much of this is driven by privacy regulation? Newer versions of Windows have been more aggressive about collecting user information, so this would not at all surprise me.

The EU has probably some of the strictest privacy regulations in the world. I don't really get why you would think that.

Given that they are launching in some of the EU countries, not much. That said, I do hope their data harvesting breaks some laws somewhere and they get fined handsomely. This trend is atrocious.

They exclude about 180 countries

Are there any actual stats of how profitable African countries are for Microsoft?

I'd have to look. My previous employer spends a life changing amount of money on Azure. MS has a lot of local partners. They have an office here which seems adequately staffed (might be mostly consultants). I'd say 90% of South African businesses use Office365 to done level. We have Xbox subscriptions. When the Xbox came out, people bought it.

On the surface, Microsoft should be making decent revenue. It won't compare with the revenue from the 8 markets they chose. However that's my point, if they include smaller markets strategically in some launches, it can benefit them in the future.

Excluded how you mean?

"The Windows Dev Kit 2023 is now available to developers in 8 countries: Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States."

Seems odd to leave India out while keeping China on the list next to France before Germany. Apple is going to manufacture the gadgets in India and the former Indochina region.

Will be interesting to see the memory capacity on the next new Mac Mini expected in one or two month.

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