Israel v. Microsoft, Next Round 464
hodet writes "From Haaretz.com, in predictable fashion,
looks like a little tough bargaining with Microsoft is
all that is needed to get your way. As many predicted after this
story, looks like all you have to do is threaten to move to an OSS alternative
to make them relent. Maybe it's time to stop getting excited about every
little announcement that comes out." The upshot of the story is that Microsoft is willing to split the components of Office in order to sell it to the Israeli government's Finance Ministry. Reader blunte, though, links to a story that discounts the importance of MS's move: "Israel re-iterates: No More MS Software. This is round two. MS has made an effort to reconcile with Israel, and Israel still says No. Israel govt's purchases account for 3-4% of MS Israel's annual revenue."
I wonder if... (Score:4, Insightful)
Israel is just the start (Score:5, Insightful)
Even worse for M$ is that it would be a high-profile win and an effective endorsement for OSS which could tip the balance for potential OSS users sitting on the fence waiting to see if OSS really does provide a viable alternative to M$.
Re:Israel is just the start (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem will be that, once it chooses OSS, the Israeli government will then give a large push to the translation effort of OSS to Hebrew and to the support of bidi writing. _This_ will enable other Israeli clients to finally move to OSS and will cost M$ a lot in Israel...
Re:I wonder if... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I wonder if... (Score:5, Insightful)
Peace would be a start.
Re:I wonder if... (Score:3, Insightful)
The two-state solution was implemented a long time ago. All the land from the Mediterranean Sea through Transjordan comprises Palestine, and all of it was originally to be for the Jews. But Palestine was cut into two partitions: a small part for the Jews west of the Jordan River (presently Israel) and the rest of Palestine (presently Jordan) for the Arabs. (Never min
Re:I wonder if... (Score:5, Funny)
Israeli policy is never to negotiate with terrorists.
Re:I wonder if... (Score:3, Insightful)
It will accelerate (Score:5, Insightful)
They sell to a saturated market and need to grow earnings to maintain their stock-price.
Because Microsoft no longer gets new customers, actually they are starting to lose customers, the only way to raise earnings is to squeeze out more of existing customers locked in.
Their new licensing programme is doing exactly that and is just the start.
The irony is that only the Microsoft-loyal customers are getting ripped off, while customers who haven't bought into MS-technologies (and run servers on Unix) like for example Munich get huge offers for discounts.
However with rising licensing costs, the incentive to move away also rises, so I don't think Microsoft can play that game much longer. Very soon their earnings will begin to fall. Either because they lose just too many customers or because they will have no other choice other than to lower prices.
Re:It will accelerate (Score:4, Insightful)
Because Microsoft no longer gets new customers, actually they are starting to lose customers, the only way to raise earnings is to squeeze out more of existing customers locked in.
Well, there is another way... Given its billions in the bank and its wealth of engineering talent, Microsoft *could* grow by diversifying, innovating (real innovation, not Microsoft's usual form of it), creating new products, finding new ways to *serve* their customers, so that the customers would be happy to give them money, etc.
When contemplating the above ideas, be careful to keep in mind that you're contemplating some future, changed, Microsoft, an anti-Microsoft, even, that just happens to have possession of the current company's bank accounts and employees. If you don't, you'll end up spraying Coke through your nose and ruin your keyboard. That hurts, I know. And it burns your nasal passages, too.
Complaints (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft Head Office has refused to add Hebrew support to Office v.X. Microsoft Israel had offered to foot the localization costs (probably a stupid move), but Microsoft refused them.
Re:Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
downturn for M$? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:downturn for M$? (Score:5, Interesting)
All loyal MS customers who use MS technology (like .NET): Expect to pay more for your licenses.
All MS-critics who use cross-platform technology (like Java, OpenOffice): Expect Microsoft to reward your forward thinking with sweet discounts.
Standing their ground (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Standing their ground (Score:5, Interesting)
At last? People have been moving away from MS solutions for years. The "movement" is snowballing, and gaining more momentum as more and more media outlets report "alternative" software solutions like linux, but don't think the Israel govt are pioneering anything here; they're simply the latest in a long line of organisations moving away from MS (my current employer another example of the exodus).
Re:Standing their ground (Score:5, Insightful)
What will be better is the result of this standing fast. Until recently, the FUD of "Linux is actually pricier than MS in the long run" didn't have a great deal of examples to look at to disprove it.
If, in 2 years, the entire israeli government is still using OSS, hasn't paid license fees, is upgrading as they need and patching as they need, from open source solutions, and finds it's a saving, that's a very demontratable large scale deployment that screams out...
"It Worked Here"
Israel's standing fast and adopting the full open source solution will make it easier for other countries and companies to find an excuse to stand fast.
nude macgirl webcams [151.197.31.93]
Re:Standing their ground (Score:5, Insightful)
more importantly, this may help make inroads against the "ibm mindset"... you know, "nobody ever got fired for buying ibm".
in the corporate culture there is a natural trend towards conservatism in business choices. if you go with the underdog and things go poorly, your decision becomes the focus of blame. if you go with the established, popular choice and things fail, the blame is more likely to go somewhere else.
overcoming this mindset is crucial for oss to get adopted with the big purchasers. if enough large, conservative organizations (and the isreali gov't is pretty conservative and large) adopt Oo, this mindset might actually work in their favour
Actually it is catastrophic (Score:4, Insightful)
When some regions like Munich and Israel adopt a different standard, their big sales argument starts to tumble.
Software vendors better jump off .NET because maybe the next generation of customers might want to use non-MS systems or existing customers are located in non-MS regions. Better play it save and use Java or Qt.
Customers will see big examples of how Linux is a real alternative and is used big time in the real world. That alone (that it can be done) will cost Microsoft billions.
The constant efforts by MS to be as incompatible as possible will no longer help them and start to hurt them.
According to the article... (Score:2)
Re:According to the article... (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed, and it goes like this:
MS: So, we're going to sell you our lock-in software at inflated prices because you obviously have no other alternative; then be prepared for a mandatory accelerating upgrade cycle combined with price hikes.
Customer: So.... we were thinking maybe of using open-source softw-
MS: We can do software individually wrapped with gold foil and a complementary kiss on the ass.
Customer: SOLD!
Split the components of Office? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Split the components of Office? (Score:2)
Such an illusion. But that's packaging for ya.
Re:Split the components of Office? (Score:2, Interesting)
But back then, IIRC, you could buy them as separate components. And now that you can't, the logo is different; it's all connected together as one big set of loops for Office 2003. Hmmm...
Some things in life money cant buy... (Score:5, Funny)
Some things in life money cant buy, for everything else there's:
Outlook 2003:....$109.99
Word 2003:.......$229.99
Excel 2003:......$229.99
PowerPoint 2003:.$229.99
Access 2003:.....$229.99
Publisher 2003:..$169.99
Frontpage 2003:..$199.99
Project 2003:....$599.99
Total: $1999.92
Re:Split the components of Office? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Split the components of Office? (Score:5, Funny)
No, Microsoft would never use tar. They use a proprietary file format called CAB.
Will they understand now? (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft, you need to make cheaper software. You also need to sell it in a way customer wants it sold, not in a way that generates maximum earnings, while screwing everybody, left and right.
Monopoly doesn't work anymore. There are alternatives and they work well.
Agreed! Just as long as you... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Will they understand now? (Score:3, Funny)
They're obviously listening. As Mekkab said, "Use the promotional code 'LINUX; and get thousands off your Microsoft installation costs!"
Quoth the article: [yahoo.com]
Now that's the kind of discount I'd sure like to see more of!
Re:Will they understand now? (Score:2)
Ballmers trip to Australia was planned months before telstra starting making noises. It certainly was convenient timing, but nothing more.
Telstra is NOT scrapping Windows desktop. Telstra is talking about it, muttering about it, making noises, but show me one firm plan of confirmation of a wide scale deployment.
Re:Will they understand now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Their software is cheap. Windows and Office are essentially just repackaged and made incompatible every 3-4 years, some features added and that's it. Not really expensive.
It's just sold expensively, to pay for XBox, MSN, WinCE and their profits of course.
Re:Will they understand now? (Score:3, Interesting)
Then what is it about?
He didn't say money wasn't a factor, he said money wasn't everything. So your question should really be phrased, "what else is it about?" And in this case, one of the things it seems to be about is Hebrew language support. There may be (probably are) other issues as well. (Like trust, like promoting a local software industry, like not getting locked into one-sided long-term contracts, like control of your own destiny, like freedom, etc.)
> Micros
Re:Will they understand now? (Score:5, Informative)
They are quite far from being the richest company in the world. They simply have a lot of liquid assets, and sit in a position that gets them a lot of attention. GM for a while was considered the largest company in the world, but with oil company mergers (Exxon-Mobile anyone?), car company mergers (DaimlerChrysler, combining Daimler, Mercedes Benz, Chrysler, and Mitsubishi Motors), there are a lot of other large, wealthy companies. Microsoft has a lot of money, but if their customer-base as it stands dries up, they don't have a lot of fixed assets.
Re:Will they understand now? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've worked for several places where each time a special piece of software was needed for a task, the question came up of "Should we assign that job to our software development team, or is there a pre-made solution that will do the job?" These were typically "Microsoft shops" too.
Open source is teriffic, but the fact still remains that most businesses prefer pre-packaged solutions, provided at a perceived fair price and with some level of trust/confidence the product will be supported in the future. Your software development team is a costly resource that can only work on so much code at one time. You don't want them building a big solution you could have gotten 95% of for 1/3rd. the cost if you just visited your software store.
That's why companies *do* need to feel they can trust open source developers. The most widely implemented packages in Linux are all projects that are "tried and true" solutions, with long histories of updates and support. (Apache, postfix, mysql, etc. etc.)
I Like This (Score:5, Insightful)
"Seeking to cut costs, the Finance Ministry recently said it would not purchase new software from Microsoft this year.
It also said it would encourage the development of lower-priced alternatives. To that end, it is cooperating with Sun Microsystems (NasdaqNM:SUNW - News) and IBM (NYSE:IBM - News) to design a Hebrew language version of OpenOffice software, a freely distributed open-source alternative to Office."
After all of the anticompetitive and unethical behavior that we've seen out of Microsoft, I think that they deserve this. Especially after their I'm glad that Israel is standing firm on this. Netscape may be dead, but perhaps we've learned some lessons on how to effectively deal with an unethical monopoly.
Re:Something wicked this way comes (Score:5, Interesting)
And frankly, if my secretary needed a silly paper clip to figure out how to print something, they'd be fired, because they sure as hell don't meet my definition of a secretary.
OpenOffice and Microsoft (hell, the whole "GUI Paradigm" ) all function with the same basic concepts. For most kind of work ( basic spreadsheets / memo's) retraining consists of saying, "The menu's are a little different, but everything's in there, have a bit of a look, knock yourself out."
For the advanced stuff, it turns out that people who actually do the advanced stuff can normally be retrained fairly easily as well.
Re:Something wicked this way comes (Score:3, Informative)
still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac (Score:5, Informative)
Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac (Score:2)
Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac (Score:2)
Maybe the ability of the free *nixen wrt input methods, locales and bidirectional text might have won Israel over. The internationalisation effort on the free systems certainly is a lot futher than Microsoft has ever gotten. The fact still is that you need a special japanese windows version to write japanese in it, same goes for arabic, hebrew or whatever language you write in.
With UNIX-
Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac (Score:4, Informative)
There have been Chinese versions of MS Office for almost 10 years. That's a lot harder than alphabetic scripts like Hebrew.
Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac (Score:3, Insightful)
Which one would you write for?
(btw, I'm not sure the elaborate glyphs are what make Chinese more complicated, but rather the vertical orientation. Right-to-left is basically the same code as left-to-right text, only factored for bi-directionality. But vertical text? Thar be dragons there!)
Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac (Score:4, Insightful)
When the market of over a billion pirates my software instead of buying it, I go for the six million that might actually pay.
Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac (Score:5, Informative)
Mac OSX supports Hebrew. The real issue is cost, not ease. Working for a speech/language company, it is the total cost of a product, not how hard it is to develop that kills most projects like this.
We dropped Japanese, not because it was hard (the product was complete and japanese had been done in previous versions). It was dropped because the salary for QA, support, management, OEM sales chain, advertising, and maintanance were just too high. There was very little reuse of staff due to the language, a QA engineer who does not know Japanese (Hebrew) isn't going to be any help. One more language means one more product in the release schedual, which extends the time it takes to make releases and move on to developing the next new killer feature.
What incentive does MS really have? Some small % of the 4% of their sales in a country (This is Mac specific, not all %4 is Mac). It's a big drop in the bucket, but its not enough to pay for all those people and the potential for derailment of other projects. What is the potential to sell this 'feature' to recoup the cost? HEbrew on Mac Office? Very little to none I'd guess.
No, its not because its 'hard' (and I doubt its that). It's cost verses potential profit. When looking for a reason, look to money first.
Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac (Score:2)
And a noisy bunch hitting your reputation.
Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac (Score:2)
Have you seen the code? There are undoubtedly many issues with Hebrew support, and if only one impacts architecture, Microsoft is within its rights to say no, even if there is money being offered here.
Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac (Score:4, Insightful)
It's probably a lot easier than it sounds, or at least easier than Microsoft would admit.
Apple has historically provided OS-level support for Hebrew and other non-Roman languages. I can imagine that a word processor like Word might do its own text input and rendering for the document view, but the rest of Word and indeed the rest of Office should be able to take advantage easily of the support that Apple offers. This was certainly true for MacOS 8 and 9, and this page [apple.com] and my own experience lead me to believe that OS X's support for other languages is even better than it was in those older systems.
I suspect that MS is simply dragging its feet on implementing Hebrew in Office for Macintosh because a) it's more work for them and b) the alternative is Windows.
Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac (Score:2)
Software Sales Cycle (Score:5, Insightful)
All CIOs know it... don't buy 'till the last week of the quarter, suddenly discover an alternative solution at the last minute, wheel out competitor's products, competitor's salesguys, consultants and competitor. Beat that software vendor to death.
Must be hard being a Microsoft enterprise rep or sales consultant these days. I am sure they are thoroughly sick of hearing the words 'Linux', and 'Open Source' at every sales meeting they attend.
Not that I feel terribly sorry for them mind you...
The Right. The Drama(TM) (Score:2)
Will Isreal's portion of foreign-aid increase or decrease?
Please, talk amounghst yourselves.
Re:The Right. The Drama(TM) (Score:5, Interesting)
We've seen cases before where American aid to Israel was structured in such a way as to encourage it to purchase stuff from America companies rather than do things itself; one example of this was the Galil -- Israel designed and manufactured a pretty damn fine assault rifle, but then found that the money coming from the US was structured such that it was much, much cheaper to just buy M16s.
Now, mind you, that's probably influenced by the huge brib^H^H^H^Hcontributions defense companies give the government, and I don't think M$ contributes quite *that* much, but we're not very far away from a situation where, say, the next appropriations bill to support Israel has $X million for software purchases from US firms.
(Oh, and I was born and raised Israeli, have lived in the US since 1985, prefer Unix and am writing this on a WinXP laptop. My loyalties are all over the place
Re:The Right. The Drama(TM) (Score:3, Insightful)
Too bad for MS... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe Israel would be more inclined to purchase MS again if MS would just fix the problem, hmmm?
Re:Too bad for MS... (Score:3, Interesting)
Heck, I can fully understand why Israel says no.
Greater market at indirect risk (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, in the somewhat longer term, losing that 3-4% of the market will put pressure on the remainder of their sales in Israel. I'm sure that there will be a lot of businesses that will need to communicate with the government electronically. If MS Word and similar file formats can no longer be assumed to be correctly readable by government employees, then businesses will start shifting to software that produces files/attachments that they know can be read properly.
Re:Greater market at indirect risk (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. Once the StarOffice formats become the de-facto standard for communicating with the government lots of other businesses are going to realize that they too can get away with using StarOffice (or OpenOffice.org). If the Israeli government does switch pretty soon every single business in Israel will find that they have to have at least one machine lying around with OpenOffice.org on it.
Small correction (Score:2)
If you had to pay for it, yes that would probably be the mode of operandi, however since it is free it will reside on all machines. Why would you go to another machine, if you could just use your own.
Re:Greater market at indirect risk (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenOffice.org will certainly open and save in MS Office formats. However, once you get OpenOffice.org on all of those government desktops how long do you think it is going to be before Israeli government workers are simply emailing around OpenOffice.org formats? MS Word is absolutely useless for opening OpenOffice.org documents. That will leave MS Office users with two alternatives.
Re:Greater market at indirect risk (Score:3, Interesting)
Especially given that the OpenOffice.org formats result in smaller files. Combined with the issues of MS Word documents possibly having data you don't want third parties to see.
Re:Greater market at indirect risk (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried using OpenOffice, and ran into constant small problems with opening documents prepared by MS Office tools. The problems with Word were mostly annoying -- the spacing slightly wrong here, a font size different there, etc. The problems with Excel and PowerPoint were much more serious. A noticable fraction o
This must mean... (Score:3, Funny)
Buying Office Programs as individual components (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Buying Office Programs as individual components (Score:2)
I'd go with a bit of both, although either stand up on their own.
Re:Buying Office Programs as individual components (Score:5, Informative)
Isreal is complaining that the Office bundle has one or more applications they don't want, but it is more expensive to buy the applications separately than it is to buy the bundle (well, DUH).
How does this effect the Israeli Economy? (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess considering the current government is relatively fiscally socialist (yes, the Likud gov't is more to the left than most people think) they could probably find better use for the money such as education, health care or other emergency medical services that are unfortunately needed due to the recent situation.
Re:How does this effect the Israeli Economy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Small government? (Score:2, Interesting)
Israel govt's purchases account for 3-4% of MS Israel's annual revenue.
3-4% sounds way low. Here in Australia governments account for 30-40% of MS Revenue.
3-4% can't be right (Score:2)
There is something wrong with this number. In any western world government expenditure is between 20%-30% of GDP and MS sales as a percent would mirror that. Israel is no exception, probably on the high side because of their elevated security expenses.
If the number is correct it must exclude the Military and the health sector. What are thhos sectors using? This is a smoke screen of sorts somthing else is going on behind the scene
You're misreading (Score:2)
> If the number is correct it must exclude the Military and the health sector.
I don't think MS Israel has a Military or health sector.
Re:3-4% can't be right (Score:2, Informative)
Former British Empire:
Australia: 36.0%
Canada: 40.6%
Ireland: 34.4%
New Zealand: 36.5%
United Kingdom: 40.9%
United States: 35.6%
Average: 37.3%
Germanic Europe:
Austria: 51.9%
Belgium: 50.2%
Germany: 48.6%
Luxembourg: 46.1%
Netherlands: 47.3%
Average: 48.8%
Latin Europe:
France: 54.0%
Italy: 47.7%
Portugal: 46.1%
Spain: 39.8%
Average: 46.9%
Scandanavia:
Denmark: 55.3%
Finland: 49.2%
Do you think that... (Score:4, Funny)
What might have clinched it. (Score:2)
Big Clients could write the stuff themselves (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this is ultimately the pay off of a moral stance on software. Governments have a resposibility to literacy, computers are the new literacy. Just like governments give out books they should give out software whenever possible.
The GPL makes it very likely that what gets developed is distributed with little expensive management or strategy. The patronage of the government(s) basically create a marketing free zone. I think this translates into a lot of money available for coding. All it takes is a couple of successful projects a year and Open source could walk through the markets reflecting the government will with democratic software.
120 million thats a lot of money to develope a system that writes memos, even with Hebrew Characters, -- especially when the project rests on the available work of others and is designed to contribute to future projects.
ls
It's Munich all over again! (Score:4, Insightful)
And just like in Munich's case, Microsoft did a counter-proposal that was much cheaper than its normal offering (in the case of Munich, the MSFT proposal ended up being cheaper than the SuSE/IBM/Linux proposal)!
And just like Munich, Israel still kept sticking with Linux, despite Microsoft's concession on the price!
Do we see a pattern here? Hint: it's not because of the price. It's because of whatever else Microsoft stands for (vendor lock-in, lack of security, lack of reliability, proprietary interfaces, disregard for consumer and competition, ...)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Negative costs for software? (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting...did MS really pay the Thai and UK governments to use MS products? After all it is pretty hard to reduce the price of anything more than 100%. Heck if MS wants to pay me to use Office, I'll gladly cash that check.
Now that I think about it, it wouldn't surprise me of MS DID in fact pay the gov'ts to use its products...I'm sure they would receover the costs multiple time over somewhere else.
Question... (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been curious about this for quite some time now, but have been unable to find a budget analysis broken down by vendor.
I wonder how far will MS go (Score:3, Funny)
Microsoft, it said, "has recently broken its policy of unified pricing of products worldwide. In Thailand and England there were reductions of hundreds of percent" on products that it sells.
I want a two hundred percent reduction in price too!
About time a country stands up to MS (Score:3, Interesting)
MSOffice is priced too high, Israel understands this. Israel also understands that OpenOffice.org is a lot cheaper and can do much of the same things as MSOffice.
OpenOffice.Org should be ported to many different languages if it is to compete with MSOffice. I see this as a bold move to help bring about an alternative to MSOffice that is more affordable. I wonder if certain Software can be called Kosher? :)
I am reminded of China going with its own version of Linux and trying to develop an alternative to Windows from it. Will more countries get the guts to say "No" to Microsoft and use alternatives or make deals with other companies to create alternatives? I hope so.
This could be the start of a new trend. A movement away from MS products and towards alternatives like OSS products.
One factor not mentioned in the articles is Malware, Windows and MSOffice can easily be inflected by Malware but Linux and OpenOffice.Org are not infected by the same Malware. So there is a hidden cost to the TCO, if the Microsoft software gets infected with Malware. Consider a few hours of downtime to scrub the systems of the Malware infected on it.
Correct Version. (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft: *funds suicide bombers*
Isreal: "We have NO idea how Mr. Gates and Mr Balmer ended up dead. Next question."
Re:Correct Version. (Score:2)
I suspect that many of the biza
Re:Correct Version. (Score:2)
Wow.. that also happens a lot whenever Microsoft is brought up
What's your point?
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:3, Funny)
Israel: *nukes Redmond*
Re:Palestinian viruses attacks... (Score:3, Informative)
Don't you mean when 7 arab lands invaded ISRAEL the DAY IT WAS CREATED in 1948?
the stealing of Palestinian lands
Don't you mean "the arab lands of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem fully owned by Arabs (Egypt and Jordan) before 1967, yet they refused to give the Palestinians their own state?"
C'mon... i admit Israel can be really tough, too tough. And their system of gov't has a LOT that can be corrected, but anyone who s
Re:Which is it, Slashdot ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Does it matter? Well, if it does, I'd guess most of us are "Israel-neutral".
Re:Something dangerous to say on /. (Score:4, Insightful)
a little optimistic, aren't we? You make a good point. If Microsoft's products were absolutely horrible from a personal user viewpoint, then nobody would buy them. But you can't very well argue about cost effectiveness against a free product that is as basic as an office program.
Let's face it, word processors and spreadsheets aren't exactly like GUIs and 3D graphics utilities. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there have been very few major improvements in word processing technology since they started making the page background white and the text black. "Word art" doesn't count, and especially not that annoying little paper clip thing (I want to bend him into an inappropriate shape).
Think about it this way: they either pay 3-4% of MS's annual revenue... or they can pay nothing. Now, even if I had to type with my feet because the program only supported special foot-keyboards, I would STILL choose the free program. Maybe that was a bad analogy, but you get the point.
Re:Something dangerous to say on /. (Score:5, Interesting)
The funny thing about office suites is that it doesn't really matter what you like, what matters is what everyone else uses. For example, I still think that WordPerfect is the best word processor I have ever used. However, you can't email WordPerfect documents to people and expect them to be able to read them, and so I spend a lot of time using MS Word.
That's why deals like the Israeli government are so important. If Sun can win over the Israeli government to StarOffice then within a year or so every single Israeli business is going to have a copy of StarOffice (or OpenOffice.org) installed on one of their computers so that they can use StarOffice formats for correspondence with the government. Everyone ends up having to talk to the government, and you can bet that if the government switches office suites that is going to have a big impact on the rest of the Israeli market.
Microsoft is going to have to switch tactics sooner or later. Right now Microsoft uses the fact that their formats are a de-facto standard to tie businesses to their upgrade treadmill. However, the days when Microsoft can walk into a business and dictate terms are over, and frankly, that's good for everyone. I have never thought that Microsoft was a monopoly, but I am glad to see them get a little competition.
Re:Something dangerous to say on /. (Score:3, Insightful)
The rest of your argument is reasonable, but this part is really not. There are many examples of MS "using it's power to force little guys out of the market". And not just little guys, but big ones (until MS had wiped them out, anyway). With bundling and OEM deals the competition is locked o
Re:Something dangerous to say on /. (Score:2, Insightful)
Funny that a lot of the grief we have had from MS attacks were because of IIS and SQL server... Both of which have significantly less market share than Apache and Oracle for example...
They make SOME good products (Score:5, Insightful)
Office is OK (I even have Office X for the Mac which I prefer to the PC versions), but frankly although each part of office has a lot of features, I would not call any of them great. For straight-up word processing, I much prefer the version of Wordperfect I used to use in college to Word, any version. And for DTP (where you are trying to position elements exactly) Word is pretty much useless.
That's the problem lots of people have with Microsoft - Almost all of Microsoft products are simply OK. There are none that I think of that are so nice to use I find them pleasant. There are plenty of non-Microsoft products that I find very pleasant indeed - like Photoshop. And let's talk about Photoshop for a moment - somehow that remains a huge success despite most major graphical file formats (like TIF or JPG) being totally open specs. Word relies heavily on dominance exactly because no-one can exactly get reading/writing Word files correct.
In other words, Microsoft usually leads based on a strategy of ignorance, whereas other companies (like Adobe) manage to lead through competence.
In that respect I would disagree with your comment about Microsoft simply producing better and cheaper products being the reason they pull ahead. To some extent this is true, but the missing factor that makes it work is that they use any means possible to make sure everyone is using their stuff and not anyone else's, then by keeping data-interchange fixed to work best in Microsoft products they gain a huge leverage that is almost impossible to overcome. Almost impossible - luckily for everyone the slow adoption rate of various versions of Office has meant there has been time to decode the file format and make other word-processing and office suite options a reality.
The way for Microsoft to compete would be to give away copies of the latest version of Office for free, essentially hitting the resent button on the market and making everyone have to play file-format catchup again. But even that might not work well as there are still so many people on older versions of the OS that Office does not support, they might not gain traction even if free.
If Microsoft truly had a product based on quality and price, then Open Office would be no threat. As it is you have an army of users literally chomping at the bit for some other option. How good of a userbase can that be?
Re:Something dangerous to say on /. (Score:4, Interesting)
But MS has used very sharp business practices to increase their profits, and screw others - namely customers, and competitors.
But, simply because they might (in the future) make a better product, doesn't mean I'd really consider using them again.
Guido might decide he'd only break your legs instead of killing you. Does that make you think - "Oh, Guido's turned over a new leaf. I think I'll make him a majority shareholder in my company!" ? I think not. MS is a sharp dealing company who uses thuggish tactics to screw over who it wills. That isn't going to change, and simply because they make it cheaper or better isn't going to make me put the scorpion in *my* pocket when I have other options.
The real problem for Microsoft, is that much of the world feels this way, IMHO. This isn't a problem, when MS has all our balls in their iron grip. Most of us aren't willing to risk the pain, and don't have lots of options. But when those options DO appear, the whole world will line up to stick the shiv in MS's soon to be lifeless body.
People may suck up to the bully when they have to. But that doesn't mean they loose their memory when they don't have to anymore.
We'll see when and if Linux gets dominance in the PC market about security holes. But I suspect it will still be miles ahead of MS.
(BTW, you don't want people to stereotype YOU, but you say "lot of other people won't say because they blindly hate Microsoft a little too much."
Pot, meet kettle.
Sheesh.
Cheers,
Greg
Re:Something dangerous to say on /. (Score:2)
The
That's only insightful if... (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, I think you jumped the gun a bit to early on proclaiming your prognosticative powers. The time to be smug is when something you predict actually comes to pass.
Since there are factors at work besides price, i would say Israel is serious and will just keep telling Microsoft to go away.
Re:That's only insightful if... (Score:5, Funny)
Just out of curiosity, is it possible to jump the gun too late?
Re:That's only insightful if... (Score:5, Interesting)
MS offered a $2000 discount on MSOffice software to Schoolnet Nambia
only to make them fork out $9000 for Win XP.
SNNs' director told MS (i'm paraphrasing) to f*** off and is sticking
with open source software.
www.linuxformat.co.uk
Re:That's only insightful if... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:*offtopic* small problem with windows XP (Score:3, Informative)