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Sony To Package StarOffice On European PCs
Jahf writes "This News.com article talks about how Sony is adopting Sun's Star Office suite over Microsoft office in some areas. It's nice to see it being adopted, maybe this is the beginning of a trend. While Star Office is still not as optimized as it could be (read: it eats memory and can be a little slow even compared to MS Office), it has all the features most people need and then some at a much better price." Specifically, as reader Yacoubean points out (pointing to coverage at InfoWorld),"The PCs will be sold in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Austria and Switzerland."
Microsoft had a monopoly, Sony does not have a monopoly on PCs. If memory serves, it is not illegal to have a monopoly, nor is it illegal to bundle applications, but it is illegal to use bundling to tie one market to the market you have a monopoly in.
Besides, I say that if the almighty dollar causes more marketing and development work to be done in the name of Open Source and Free Software, than so be it!
well yes it was. What Sun/Sony is doing is different in that Sony is but one OEM and it's their system. Now Microsoft came in and bundled apps in the OS and told every OEM that if they don't keep the bundled apps they will lose their license to sell the MS Windows OS. There is a big difference here. Atleast if the OEMs can decide what their customers might want, users would have choices among OEMs for the hardware and software features they want prePackaged .
Without choice and competition, Microsoft has been able to dictate what is popular and what's not.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
they're enemies.
sony knows that office and windows are the cash cows for microsoft. sony knows that if microsoft starts hurting there, they can't afford to keep pissing money away on the xbox, sony's direct competition...
it's a street fight, and sony just kicked microsoft in the balls.
makes sense to me.
it'll be interesting to watch where it goes.. a new service pack kills sony dvd drivers? I have no clue.
either way I'll get some laughs out of the two slugging it out.
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I think all the posters who are talking about the relationship between this and the fact that MS is competing with Sony with the X-BOX are just plain wrong.
If Sony was a well-run organization, its computer division would be making business decisions based on their own market rather than some vague spite because of some other divisions battles. There are several valid business reasons why offering a cheaper (to Sony) Office solution would make business sense.
MS is not going to run out of money any time soon - so suggesting that this is being done so MS stops spending money is just plain asinine. Rather, the very reason MS is investing in the XBOX is because they want to earn money in more diverse ways and if the Office business were to become less profitable, that would only encourage them to invest further into other markets in the hopes of being able to grow or maintain revenue.
It is possible that management asked the computer division to do this and use that as a threat to ask Microsoft to back off from the XBOX. However, that is arguably an antitrust violation similar to the one Microsoft got into trouble for since the PS2 is a virtual monopoly. However, I sincerely doubt that this is the case.
Mmmm.. Donuts