Microsoft Loses Showdown in Houston

An anonymous reader writes "It seems the city of Houston has decided against using Microsoft software. It really is amazing how much it costs to use (and maintain) software. I can't help but wonder if this will become a trend." Turns out they decided on the relativly unknown SimDesk suite, which has nothing to do with The Sims, sadly. Many, many posts about this. In additional news seldo writes "There's an interesting interview on News.Com with Peter Houston. He discusses Microsoft's changing attitude in competing with Linux -- no longer calling it a "cancer" but instead promoting the advantages of Windows."

Comments

Recession and Open-Source

[ignatzMouse]

It's starting to look like the US recession will be one of the best things to happen to the Open-Source movement.

Re:Funny enough, this will be good for MS users to

[sql*kitten]

This means that, for the foreseeable future, MS users will be getting a product that will be the result of a pricewar with Free software, will have features that compete with OSS features, and will have a level of quality that attempts to approach OSS quality.

Have a look at simdesk.com - it's covered in words like "proprietary" and "patented". Houston's decision is neither particularly good nor bad for OSS.

usatoday's attitude

[daniel_howell]

The actual meat of the story is interesting, an a hopeful sign, but so is the lead paragraph. It presents Microsoft as bullying it's clients into agreeing to it's terms.

Nothing new there, but when this is the tone taken by mainstream media, and seen as so non-controversial that it's mentioned and then passed over, then Microsoft have already lost their key battle. Their marketing depends on them being seen as the safe option. If they are seen as the problem, then (as here) people will go looking for solutions.

Re:Funny enough, this will be good for MS users to

[esarjeant]

I think it depends what you're doing. If you're sending information to customers, then simply export your OpenOffice docs to PDF. You should be doing this anyway, even if you're using MS Word, because the PDF is the only way to ensure your document will be delivered properly. Heck, even MS Word isn't compatible with MS Word!

If you need to collaborate, then encourage everyone on the team to either adopt an open standard (HTML, RDF, etc.) or get them onboard with OO.