Microsoft is to offer cheap software to governments in developing markets as it strives to meet its aim of doubling the number of computer users to 2 billion by 2015.

Speaking in Beijing, Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and chairman, said the group would offer a software package designed for students for $3 (£1.50) to governments who buy Windows-based computers and give them to schoolchildren to use at home.

The move comes as the world’s largest software group battles rampant piracy in emerging markets and faces an upturn in philanthropic schemes that plan to offer basic computers, which do not rely on Microsoft software, to schoolchildren in the developing world.

In July the non-profit One Laptop Per Child will begin shipping 5 million laptops, priced at $100 each. Designed for developing countries, the machine – dubbed XO – can be recharged by hand. Crucially, for Microsoft, they run on the rival Linux operating system.

Nicholas Negroponte, who launched the project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab in 2004, has said he thinks it is "criminal" that shoolchildren spend time learning how to use Microsoft products - rather than "communicating, exploring, sharing".

Microsoft has stressed that its efforts in this area are not philanthropic, but motivated by commercial reasons.

The $3 software bundle, which will be released in the second half of this year, will include the Windows XP Starter Edition operating system and Microsoft Office Home, a package that includes applications such as Word.

A Microsoft spokesman said the scheme was designed to “help close the digital divide” and “bring social and economic opportunity to the estimated 5 billion people who are not yet realising the benefits of technology.”

It will also seed a working knowledge of Microsoft software systems, which account for as much as 90 per cent of the market, in a new generation.

The developing world is seen as key for technology groups faced with saturated Western markets. Mobile phone companies, for instance, are tailoring basic, rugged handsets with long battery life, designed to be shared among communities in Africa.

Koichiro Matsuura, the director general of Unesco, said he welcomed partnerships with private groups to counter a “drastic shortage of trained teachers, which constitutes one of the major obstacles in achieving education for all".

Analysts regard cooperation between the public and private sector as key to rolling out technology in the developing world.

Roger Kay, principal analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates, said: "Strategies with the greatest potential will involve collaboration among many players, including governments, NGOs, commercial carriers, financing entities, local providers, services organisations, and hardware and software vendors.”

CK Prahalad, a professor at the University of Michigan's Stephen M. Ross School of Business, said: "Computers and connectivity are still too expensive for private ownership by the poor, and applications as well as information resources that are appropriate to this group have been slow to emerge, in part because the poor themselves have not been involved in creating them."

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