BBC Jams Cams are Poor Man's Weather Service

A quite reasonable 'looking out the nearest window' technique that works well in the UK.  Simply browse to your nearest BBC jam cam site and see what the weather looks like.

Sure you could use a proper weather service but I like the combination of old technology and new...

Ruby on Rails is Poor Man's Asp.net MVC

I'm a big fan of Ruby on Rails and use it for most of my websites including Wakeboard UK.  Asp.net MVC appears to be reasonable copy of rails, and runs on the .net platform, so good for enterprise development integration.  MVC includes most of the good things in rails, though the M part of asp.net MVC is more DIY M as you don't get ActiveRecord.

This is one case where the Poor Man's Version  is also the best!

Deflated all season tyres – Poorman's winter tyres

If you are stucked not getting up the hill on the snow, you could deflate slightly your tyres that could help. However it is not as good as using proper winter tyres.

OpenOffice is poor man's Microsoft Office

Open Office is poor man's version of Ms Office, so if you do not like to spend £200 download free version. Open office is able to open Ms Office files or even save new files in Ms Office compatible format.
One of the Open Office advantages over Ms Office is simplicity, source code of the document does not contain 1 million tags when my font is bold.  

As a poor man I really love Open Office it is almost as good as Microsoft version

Nokia E71 is Poor Man's Blackberry

It kind of looks like a Blackberry and does some of the syncing stuff... however it resets itself frequently and reception is poor.  It is however cheaper...