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Norwegian Government Expires Microsoft Contract
Jeppe Salvesen writes "The Norwegian sites are bristling with the news, and hopefully this will leak worldwide. The Norwegian Government has dropped their contract with Microsoft. Microsoft had an exclusive deal with national and regional government. Administration Secretary Victor D. Norman states that 'we feel that our contract with Microsoft in reality has given Microsoft a monopoly in a field where competition would serve us better.'. My translation. The race is on."
It would be cool to see a multinational "Knowledge Base" to be used by smaller countries wanting to go this route.
Not as an anti-Microsoft movement, but as a pro-alternative movement.
Don't read this!
...Of course, that's the best way...you know, you don't want all of the PR flacks from MS having a chance to spin this in the wrong direction.....or give them a bunch of time to start blackmailing you over license violations....
Remember all the fuss about the German government?....How about Peru? Making such a decision without letting the sales force get involved is prob. a good thing. I imagine that they (MS) would dig up every thing they could find in order to keep everyone in "lock-step" with their goals.....
I hope that this does get played up....now that the decision is made, let the chips fall where they may. I expect that there will be a lot of "surprise" defections and I imagine that they will happen pretty fast.
Thats eexactly what the EU are planning to do...
Hopefully they'll set up a 3rd world and common wealth inititive with there sharing.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
However, I think M$ has done one thing that is really starting to backfire in the corporate world ... intrusive software. XP, with it's online licensing was barely tolerable for most, and completely intolerable for some (you try connecting to the internet when in the Arctic doing geological work ... it involves sitting down and taking ~15 - 20 minutes to hook up the sattelite link, assuming you lugged the gear into the field. Heard similar horror stories from others who work in truly remote locations (Amazon, and huge parts of Africa). But now their software is coming with 'call into microsoft' features, which violate virtually every corporate security standard. In the security world, this is called a BACK DOOR and is something to be dreaded and/or blocked by anti-virus software. And now Microsoft is putting it in their products and claiming it as a feature?!?!
At one place, we ran a little test using IP hijacking, with a server outside the corporate firewall. Win XP, Office XP, and the standard suite of apps ... and managed to hack the network in less than 20 minutes. Couldn't have done it without the PC automagically dialling out for 'updates'. Which, when you consider this company (which shall remain nameless) has assets over half a trillion, and the toughest security setup possible (under M$ products), is damn scary.
We won't even get into the hassles people are running into when their software tells them it's expired, and to contact their nearest M$ rep ... especially when it hasn't.
Sure, Word et. at are slick, but the cost of running them - in terms of money, security, and hassles - are pushing people to other OS.