>What Microsoft did with artificial memory limitation is ridiculous, unless someone comes up to offer a reasonable technical explanation.
There is no technical explanation. It's purely for business reasons. This limitation seems artificial, but it's no different from any other software product that comes in multiple editions:
A software company (e.g. Adobe, IBM, Oracle, Apple, Microsoft) develops a software product; when the product is ready to ship, they call it "[Product Name] Professional Edition". Then the company cripples the product a bit (sometimes by deleting a few lines of code that enable important functionality) and calls that version "Standard Edition". Then they cripple it even more and call that version "Starter Edition".
All they are doing is manipulating bits to give people an incentive to pay top dollar, just as Microsoft did. Giving everyone the full functionality wouldn't cost them any more, since it's all just extra bits, which cost the company $0 to copy (actually, they need to spend millions of dollars building, testing and maintaining these crippled editions, so they would actually save on costs if they didn't cripple the software). I understand that what Microsoft is doing with the 32 GB limitation feels different and ridiculous, but it really isn't.
This limitation seems artificial, but it's no different from any other software product that comes in multiple editions
Right. For example, if a totally hypothetical individual developed a collaborative knowledge-base system and offered it as a service, they might decide to arbitrarily segment the market based on page views.
Now, one might make the argument that there is actually a cost associated with page views whereas there is not a cost with having your software recognize all the memory on a third party's machine, but just between us businessmen we can agree that that is malarky. For one, the cost of a marginal pageview is too small to be measured but the price to the customer of that page view is about ten thousand dollars in the first year if it was their millionth-and-first page view in January. For another, the cost the 9 million page views separating tier #2 of the hypothetical service from tier #1 is far, far less than the pricing differential.
There is no technical explanation. It's purely for business reasons. This limitation seems artificial, but it's no different from any other software product that comes in multiple editions:
A software company (e.g. Adobe, IBM, Oracle, Apple, Microsoft) develops a software product; when the product is ready to ship, they call it "[Product Name] Professional Edition". Then the company cripples the product a bit (sometimes by deleting a few lines of code that enable important functionality) and calls that version "Standard Edition". Then they cripple it even more and call that version "Starter Edition".
All they are doing is manipulating bits to give people an incentive to pay top dollar, just as Microsoft did. Giving everyone the full functionality wouldn't cost them any more, since it's all just extra bits, which cost the company $0 to copy (actually, they need to spend millions of dollars building, testing and maintaining these crippled editions, so they would actually save on costs if they didn't cripple the software). I understand that what Microsoft is doing with the 32 GB limitation feels different and ridiculous, but it really isn't.