One of the revolutionary ideas of the last few years in the technology industry is that the poor are a market. C.K. Prahalad’s “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” has helped businesspeople realize that people in poor nations have both disposeable income and investment income. People will buy goods that will better their lives, if the right goods and the right business models are made available….

Which brings us to Microsoft’s recent announcement of FlexGo(TM) “pay as you go computing”. While FlexGo is endorsed by Prahalad in Microsoft’s press release, it appears to me that it’s far more likely to be an exploitative than a liberating technology for most users.

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