Slashdot Mirror
China Upgrades from Microsoft Office
Badgerman writes "According to this Forbes article, fifteen Chinese ministries have started using a homegrown office software suite instead of Microsoft Office. The article also notes the Chinese government's encouragment of homegrown software and of a national Linux standard."
The time when such stories won't be news is at hand!
May Peace Prevail On Earth
But why are they writing their own, rather than taking the already very good OpenOffice.org, and working on that?
Get your own free personal location tracker
Let me guess - you're American, and you think you're so free.
However this has some not so nice side-effects. Such gain cause a disbalance in world's economics. Like the colonial system ruined the countries belonging to the 3rd world today, Chinas politics will ruin the economics of their mains markets, too.
However, the situation is a little different these days. In the 18th century Europe was also a military hyperpower without any opponents of the same strength. This is very different know. China has at least 3 opponents of the same military power: US, Europe, Russia. Even more the existence of weapons of mass destruction prevents China from turning the situation towards their favour. No matter how much weapons they produce, they'll be always extinguished in the case of a military conflict.
So, I wonder were this will lead in the long term. We all know the problem China has with accepting the illectual or economic property rights of forgein people. However, the superpowers of the world will not accept this forever. Bush already demanded that China ceases the artificial devaluation of the Yong. There are GATT investigations against China and their Red Linux products. Perhaps something will change in the future.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I would pay to see that.
There is no way that would become a WTO issue. The Chinese government is not outlawing Office, it is merely developing its own completely different product that does the exact same thing.
China has stated and made good on the threat of developing their own processors, their own technology, their own IT industry. They are keeping the money where it belongs, in the country.
You people bitch and moan about how communist China is a plague, yet bitch and moan when they start to develop the slightest glimmer of innovation and drive. You don't want the Chinese to be capitalists, you want the chinese to be your little boot-licking lackey dogs who turn out your cheap ass consumer goods in sweatshop like factories for a pittance. Wake up. There's a revolution going on in China, and it's only going to be for the better of Chinese society, and at the current rate, a detriment for the Western World. In ten years China's going to be as communist as Bush is going to be a personal privacy advocate wearing tye-dyed shirts and beads.
Whether it be Star Office, Open Office, Word Perfect, ABI Word, Apple Works, etc.
At a time when a lot of US Companies are looking at China as a smorgesboard of potential opportunity as it slowly evolves from a Communistic to Capitalistic society, no doubt Microsoft has looked there as well.
Personally, I don't have a problem with China inventing their own CPU, or word processing software, but if they'd like to play nicely with others in this global economy, here's hoping that they at least stick to open and published standards.
'upgrades' is nicely put. It's all about semantics. I always enjoy the unabashed way the MS propaganda department calls competing solutions 'legacy applications'. I think we should try to consistently refer to installing OpenOffice and Mozilla as upgrading and precede words like MS-Office and IE with the sentence 'legacy apps such as'
Since China is so big the economics of locally written software make a lot of good sense.
Writing programs is expensive, but given enough desktops the cost per unit can be quite small.
I think you mix up communism and socialism. They have about as much in common as the US of A and capitalism. One should not mix up ideologies and their actual implementations as they really, really, rarely meet.
Active Directory, SMS, Exchange, Fileservers, MS Office all rolled up into large bundled licenses for the corporations.
If they try to switch, they'll lose their bundled corporate licenses and have to start paying for the lot separately which is far more expensive *and* they'll have to pay for licenses for the new software at the same time.
You have to give it to the CIOs of US multinational corps, when they take the bait, they have your arm off with it.
Deleted
Because "nearly everyone" uses Microsoft Office, it's extremely difficult for any competitor to enter the market - even if the competitor was always cheaper and manifestly superior. However, if large countries increasingly use products other than Microsoft Office, then countries will have to depend on something else than "everyone uses Microsoft Office" to exchange documents. I expect that "something else" to be either a standard document format, or to eventually standardize on some "other product".
A marketplace where there are many competing office products, but a need to exchange office documents, strongly favors open source products. That's especially true if the open source product can run on any operating system, as Open Office can. It's no big deal to say "everyone, let's install Open Office for this project so we can safely exchange documents", since Open Office is free to download. I wouldn't be surprised to see countries other than the U.S. adopt other office suites first, such as Open Office, and then U.S. companies will be forced to support those products to communicate with their international partners, suppliers, offshore sites, and so on.
I love to see real competition in any market. Perhaps this will be the start of real competition in office suites.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
What does this have to do with the fact that they've stopped using Word? I'm not saying that the Chinese government is great, far from it, but I think you are mixing things up and maybe missing the point.
:)) and get recognition for it.
The fact that you (and a lot of people, myself included) don't agree with what's going on in China doesn't mean that we can't recognize when it does something right, which I think is the aim of the article.
As I far as I can see, it is always a good thing when governments, no matter what country or political system, begin considering alternatives to M$, and even better when they actually decide to adopt them because they've seen how it can be "better" (lots of reasons for that which I'm sure have been posted on Slashdot thousands of times, so I'm not going to go into that).
This is even more significant when we're talking about one of the most important countries in Asia, and that this only shows a trend amongst siginficative countries and cities which are beginning to seriously consider OSS.
OTOH, China's government is repressive and dicatorial, which is certainly no good thing; but that doesn't mean that they can't do something right (or which some people, a lot of which hang out on Slashdot
All I hope is that more countries/governments start getting the message and move away from the "M$ is our salvation" dogma that is so common amongst not so technical people.
Don't try to fix me. I'm not broken.
Telstra never intended on using OpenOffice, but were simply 'evaluating' other products in order to get a better deal from Micrsoft. It worked.
As Telstra doesn't even use Linux or Open Source software on servers, it would be quite strange indeed for them to start using Linux or OpenOffice on thousands of desktops.
I wish I had some mod points because this is exactly my feelings. I think all certain people see is in any story about China;
"blah blah blah China... commie commie commie blah blah evil China commie commie evil blah blah".
It's ridiculous and well done to China for developing their own IT infrastructure and industry.
Sorry, but no, it isn't.
Micrsoft's revenues are mostly spent on shareholder's profits, expensive useless prestige projects like XBox and MSN and above all marketing.
The costs to develop the stuff is quite low, especially in the case of Windows and Office where there isn't any real development anyway, just bugfixing, retheming and repackaging.
Even smaller countries could easily afford it.
I think microsoft is right on the ball with cheap software for thailand, but perhaps already too late. Let's see if china is just strong-arming for a similar deal...or really going for linux.
Microsoft is facing a looming battle from local (asian) programmers that are used to linux. In the end it's always these kind of social choices that dictate if a business lives or dies. Combine government choices (germany, brazil, now china) with small clusters of companies like Red Hat and breeding schools like MIT and some Indian institutes and Microsoft is facing a real struggle with a strong product backed-up by dedicated companies, customers, workforce and policy.
It usually takes ten years or so for these find of impacts to unfold...every signal right now points to a slow corruption of the windows OS.
China isn't only developing their own infastructure, it looks like they're actually working on positioning themselves in competition with everything that's in place now.
Using their own processor, their own linux distro, among other things they seem to be comming up with (DVD standard etc). I'm actually glad too. As the west ends up strangled by power struggles for control over the computer (MS) and control over your media (DRM), China may very well be the last hope feilding open technology. Sad to say, but because of our own short sightedness; it may very well be this openess that gives them the advantage.
While Microsoft has been on an anti-piracy tirade for some time, I think they tolerated it in China. Why you ask? To allow for the entrenchment of their products. Once China became hooked and beholden to Microsoft products and as they became more integrated with the world economy, China would be pressured to enforce copyright laws because they want others to do the same. But of course we find China not wanting to become beholden to anyone. So what do they start doing? Making their own CPUs which will soon start selling worldwide (IMO). They also move towards linux as their operating system thus locking Microsoft (and the US) out of their computer loop. Any encryption needs are not crippled by the US government. China can home grow them. Software needs are the same. While India is outsourcing support, programming and more for other countries, China is also developing their highly educated middle class as well in all things computers. Will probably be a few years before they start realizing the value in making and selling software on the cheap to the rest of the world. In the end it may be globalization that really undoes Microsoft and smacks them down to a more modest company.
Microsoft's perpetual problem in Asian markets is its inability to develop a character conversion system that people actually want to use. In Japanese, this is called Henkan and is the shim that converts typing on a QWERTY keyboard to Japanese (and, in the Chinese market, Chinese {traditional or Big-5]). MS has totally failed to come up with an acceptable system after years of effort, yet the local companies such as Just Systems (ATOK, et al) have no problem coming up with sophisticated predictive conversion systems whilst Microsoft blunders around with what it THINKS these markets need. MS will struggle in China because it is a US company attempting to place a Chinese veneer over its operations. Other US companies do vastly better operating overseas. Similarly, overseas companies do much better operating in the US (every Japanese company you can think of, for example).
As a sensible publishing solution, MS is handicapped by having project leaders that hav no idea what good Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese typography look like. They want a minimum-cost conversion of a US-centric package, that's what they pay for and that's what they get.
This isn't an anti-MS diatribe, it's more of a frustrated comment on how MS operates in the world. I happen to know that their internal double-byte-enabled translation tools are outstanding, for example, yet they simply don't trust the quality their translators deliver them using this tool. It's like having an agressively arrogant version of Teletubbies as clients.
Years before Linux businesses were looking at public domain software as an easy way to cut costs.
It just seammed a no-brainner to go to an open sourced operatining system like Linux but somewhere along the way Microsoft convenced the business secter that free software was dangerous and evil full of back doors and bugs and such things could bring a business to a crushing hault.
Businesses got the idea that the needed secure and reliable software and the only way to get that was to buy it from Microsoft. I guess it's a zen thing... if it get's crappy enough it'll actually be good.
I don't actually exist.
No, the problem is OSS can be suppported by a very few as there is no per copy cost of the code. In the real world, everything has a per unit cost so a few people can't support everyone else.
I always wonder what MS spends their incredibly high R&D budget on. I never see new products from MS that justify these amounts. Hell, they can't even do simple things like basic security right, so what are they spending all that money on?
-- Cheers!
Another reason appears to be security--and I don't mean the virus kind, I mean the "NSAKEY" kind. This was also mentioned in the article.
The USA's aggrandizement of late has made a lot of our allies nervous, and a lot of our future enemies paranoid. If I was the Chief of IT in another superpower, I would indeed be very paranoid about the use of a product with which a) I ran all of my intelligence and administration tools, b) I couldn't see the internal workings of, c) had the capability of communication with a foreign power.
Imagine if Mercedes was the only source for radio devices during WWII; the technology wasn't open enough for the US to build it themselves. Do you think the US would have happily accepted radio shipments from Germany, and depended upon them for their secure communications? Or would the US do their all to put in place a replacement that they could control themselves?
The only way to make security guarantees that would satisfy me would to give me the code such that I can compile the app myself, which MSFT hasn't been willing to do, even with their Open program. There's nothing that Ballmer could say to me that would convince me otherwise--nothing that would let me sleep at night with my children in the Armed Service.
I think the war in Iraq will prove to be very good for Linux.
--
$tar -xvf
Why is it that people cry out "protectionist" and anti-competitive at the first sign of some actual competetion. Yes that's right, for there to be competition there must be at *least* two companies and two products, not one. If anything, it is your attitude that is anti-competitive.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
$35 more than they should have paid!!
Go Open Office / Abi Word (and all other competitors that are free)
I always wonder what MS spends their incredibly high R&D budget on.
Wine and caviar. Microsoft Research is a black hole of irrelevance. If they had any brains for practical matters, they would solve their MS-Office interoperability problem by introducing a file siguature like the following:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
This file-signature poem is copyrighted,
So reverse engineers can munch my butt.
Copyright (C) 2003 C. S. Bruce. All rights reserved.
This poem may not be reproduced in any way by any means without express
written permission.
But it has its good points, too...anyone want a copy of Gigli or Hulk on DVD?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!