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."

Comments

How long before Ballmer is on a plane?

[Tpenta]

When Telstra in Australia started walking down the path towards replacing Microsoft Office with Star Office, Steve Ballmer made a uick trip out to make some incredible offers to the people concerned.

I wonder if teh ticket to CHina is booked yet.

Tp.

Re:How long before Ballmer is on a plane?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How long before Ballmer is on a plane?

[Blue Stone]

That's nothing to what the Thais have got after the governemnt push of cheap Linux computers.

Win XP and Office XP for $35 each and NO product activation nonsense.

Re:How long before Ballmer is on a plane?

[ndogg]

Is a uick trip quicker than a quick trip because it lacks a q?

Re:How long before Ballmer is on a plane?

[mrd_yaddayadda]

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.

Re:How long before Ballmer is on a plane?

[Blue Stone]

Oh yeah cheap Thai WinXP without product activation story at the inquirer.

Re:How long before Ballmer is on a plane?

[archen]

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.

Re:How long before Ballmer is on a plane?

[tsa]

Good point. Hey, maybe they can sell their software to the people in the Western world. Maybe it's easier to convert software to speak English (or whatever Western language) from Chinese than vice versa.

Re:How long before Ballmer is on a plane?

[SpaceLifeForm]

Actually, it's $36 per PC for the *combo* of XP + Office.

Re:How long before Ballmer is on a plane?

[Wizzy Wig]

"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."

You say that like there's something wrong with it.

International Competition for Microsoft

[vbprgrmr]

It does appear that the main driving force competing against Windows and associated applications is from other countries eager to save money. Once they show how it can be done, maybe the beancounters in American companies will follow their lead and take the linux plunge.

Re:International Competition for Microsoft

[grug0]

Wrong, wrong, wrong. WPS Office 2003 is for Windows, not linux. So this isn't a victory for Linux, as the Chinese Government will run the office suite on windows.

And protectionist anti-competitive policies for buying software is hardly something to celebrate. Governments should buy the best tool for the job, not try to prop up local industries.

Re:International Competition for Microsoft

[Alain Williams]

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.

Re:International Competition for Microsoft

[RoLi]

Writing programs is expensive

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.

Re:International Competition for Microsoft

[tsa]

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?

Re:International Competition for Microsoft

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

so what are they spending all that money on?

First Class seats on planes to various countries to convince them to keep buying their products...

Re:International Competition for Microsoft

[Johnny Mnemonic]

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.

Re:International Competition for Microsoft

[ealar dlanvuli]

the coolest games

I'm sorry, you appear to have accidently added a "s" to "game". Halo is not plural.

Re:International Competition for Microsoft

[1u3hr]

Wrong, wrong, wrong. WPS Office 2003 is for Windows, not linux. So this isn't a victory for Linux, as the Chinese Government will run the office suite on windows.

Not the whole story, from your link:

The three teams are developing three versions of WPS Office: one is WPS for Linux, another is WPS Office 2003 for Windows, and the other is WPS Office V6 for both Linux and Windows.

So assuming that the original story is exactly true, even if the initial order is for the Win version, it would be much easier to transition to the Linux version from the same company in a year or so, perhaps in lieu of buying the next Windows upgrade, or when hardware is replaced. The same strategy as Sun in releasing Star Office for Windows as well as Linux and SunOS. First break the MSOffice umbilical, then changing OS isn't so hard. No need to mess around with Crossover and such.

Re:International Competition for Microsoft

[BlackHawk-666]

How arogant of you to assume that the Chinese developers couldn't build a tool that is better for them than the MS team. They live in China, know the people of China and their desires better, read/write and use Chinese keyboards constantly and have a far better understanding of their localised needs.

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.

Re:International Competition for Microsoft

[csbruce]

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.

I wish...

[SolitaryMan]

The time when such stories won't be news is at hand!

I so wish...

[JamesP]

Chinese President in his office...
Picks up phone...

"Who's this?"

"Er. My name is Daryl McBride, from SCO cororation...Is it true that there are 1 billion computers using Linux in China?"

"Yes"

"So that will be 699 billion dollars, please..."

"Ok, we'll be sending the check any time soon"

(hangs and calls defense minister)

"Capture this McBride immediatly (ha,ha,ha)"

Re:I so wish...

[Tpenta]

It would be interesting to see SCO attempt to try this in China. I wonder just how far they would (or would not) get.

Tp.

Re:I so wish...

[orkysoft]

In Communist China, SCO gets billed by government! ;-)

Re:I so wish...

[Tpenta]

I thought it was Microsoft who "Bill"ed people :-)

Tp.

Re:I so wish...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr McBride,

Never charge more then it will cost to have you killed.
~Ancient Chinese Secret

See You Soon,
Hu Jintao

Re:I so wish...

[roystgnr]

"So that will be 699 billion dollars, please..."

"Ok, we'll be sending the check any time soon"

The proper response to SCO's demands is "We've already written you the check, but we can't tell you where it is unless you sign this NDA."

Re:I so wish...

[canajin56]

"One of the conditions is that you can't show it to people. Especially bank tellers"

"Linux-based"?

[Empiric]

This brings to mind an idea relating to SCO's continuing absurdities in trying to own and/or destroy Linux.

With a major communist government becoming increasingly invested in Linux, everyone can be assured there will be at least one completely unassailable source of Linux distribution and development, like:

SCO: We'd like you to pay us, oh... [spins wheel-o-pricing] $1499 for each processor you're running Linux on...

People's Republic of China: Did we mention our extensive nuclear arsenal, deployable to Utah within an hour?

SCO: Oh... yes... nevermind.

Given this, maybe Linux users can play the same game of arbitrary definition that SCO has been playing. If worse comes to worse, one could just say, "Oh, Linux? We're not running Linux here. We're running a non-infringing, custom, Linux-based operating system. Feel free to prove otherwise." And with a perpetual source of FTP servers to obtain the "Linux-based operating system", SCO would have a truly daunting task of stopping it or charging their hoped-for extortion fees.

Chinese Distros

[spoonist]

Here are some example Chinese distros:

Red Flag

Cosix

Magic Linux

XTeam

Screenshots here

[illtud]

Courtesy of Google (loads of hits on WPS Office):

http://www.pconline.com.cn/pcedu/soft/office/wps/1 0307/199035.html

Reinventing the wheel?

[caluml]

But why are they writing their own, rather than taking the already very good OpenOffice.org, and working on that?

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[Daniel Phillips]

But why are they writing their own, rather than taking the already very good OpenOffice.org, and working on that?

Perhaps because the office suite they're talking about has been around since 1988?

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[Gherald]

I find it very humorous when people wonder why [someone mentioned in a /. story] is not using OppenOffice.

OOo really is a very recent development and hasn't had much of a chance to enter the mainstream yet.

Axis of evil

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that Billy-Boy gotta call George-Boy to get this axis of evil expanded a bit..

Ah memories

[segment]

Some may remember some time ago when Germany also was going to yank MS products from being used by the German government. March 19th, 2001 - Two German government agencies have announced that they will discontinue the use of software made by Microsoft and other American companies. According to the German news publication Der Spiegel, both the German foreign office and the Bundeswehr (German Federal Armed Forces) have banned American software, saying that there are security concerns in using programs developed by other countries in sensitive applications. Instead, German companies such as Siemens and Deutsche Telekom will provide solutions (src: WinPlanet)

And now China... The government has been pushing the development of a homegrown software industry and a national standard for open-source Linux software to counter the spread of Microsoft in the last few years.

This is not a bad idea, and if others took the same route, MS could feel it down the road. Considering the problems associated with MS nowadays (even though it has actually been rampant for some time), with worms, and all sorts of security issues, how long will it be before some huge class action lawsuit based on MS negligently releasing shoddy products. Think about it... It's the kind of stuff that makes the NSA want to place backdoors on software, excuse being they're trying to secure products where vendors are failing.

I say, good for China on making that move, hopefully others will take cues from China, and send MS a message. No more shoddy work!!! Just imagine what will hapen if some investigation pointed to an MS product being at fault for the power failure. Oh boy would that be some crazy stuff to deal with for MS.

The Chinese use the same economic tactics

[Krapangor]

as European countries in the 18th century: Ensuring that only raw materials are imported and swamp the whole world with cheap manufractured goods. This lead Europe to the world power it's today, so it will probably work the same for China.
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.

Re:The Chinese use the same economic tactics

[tehanu]

I really don't follow this. There was no such thing as a cohesive entity called "Europe" in the 18th century. In fact the very idea of a unified Europe is new and came out of the utter devastation of two world wars. For hundreds of years, the countries of Europe have been competing very fiercely against each *other*. Especially in the colonial age. In fact if one looks at the EU *today* many of the countries still don't really see eye to eye on many things.

China may have the US, Europe and Russia as rival military powers. But in the 18th century *all* of the major European countries were rival military and economic powers. There would be Britain, France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, Spain, Italy, Poland, Portugal etc. etc. Then of course there was China and India. In 1700 China at that time had 23% of the World's GDP and India had 23% (Europe was 23%, Japan 5% and the US 0%). And of course they were no small military powers either. This leads some historians to describe the "real" Asian crisis to be from 1820 to 1950 when Asia dropped from 58% of the world's GDP to 17% in 1952. I believe the Ottoman Empire was still going strong in the 18th century and that dominated the Middle East.

The figures are from a British historian called Angus Maddison in 1998. Calculations are based on purchasing power parity.

Re:The Chinese use the same economic tactics

[eugene_t00ms]

If you want to get down to the nitty gritty and compare numbers, the Chinese have no competition when it comes to military strength. I remember reading a press release from NATO a few years back (no google hits otherwise i'd post a link) that stated even if EVERY NATO MEMBER COUNTRY provided EVERY able-bodied man and woman within the ages of 16 and 25 to a war effort against China, the most optimistic estimates of actual gains that could be made in taking chinese territory would be a handful of coastal cities at best...that doesn't exactly sound like military parity to me... As far as Bush's blustering...what in all honesty can the United States do? Commit all of its troops to a suicide manuever against China? Nuke Beijing? In this political climate the Chinese Gov could make any kind of aggressive move it wanted and there would be only economic consequences. Which is exactly what they wish to avoid. The Chinese Military is mearly there for a deterrent and a physical show of Chinese Power. The political strategists of China are thinking LONG TERM. They know the pitfalls of military conquest. They don't want to just crush the western world under military oppression. They want to buy/sell (0wnz0r if you like) the World Market and knock America's complacent decadent ass of the top of the heap. Its called World Socio-Economic Domination. Take American-style economic aggressiveness and combine it with the oldest school of strategic thinkers in the history of the world...what do you get? China being the number 1 superpower in the world and America wondering what happened? (Ask the Distinguished Mister Hatch) End of Rant...

microsoft is dying and gates is leaving the ship

[Anonymous Coward]

why else would Bill and Steve sell most of their holdings , its not like they need the money

Gates has sold over 6 million shares in August alone

http://biz.yahoo.com/t/m/msft.html

Re:Good example

[Anonymous Coward]

CLIPPY : I see you want to talk about evil and repressive governments using linux...
Hundreds of Iraqis civilians are being held in makeshift jails run by US troops - many without being charged or even questioned. And in these prisons are children whose parents have no way of locating them

And don't forget...

[Anonymous Coward]

No list of Chinese Linux distributions would be complete without a link to Thiz Linux, the wonderful Chinese distro being sold on machines at Fry's ;)

--
Rate Naked People at Fuck Meter! (Not work-safe)

Awh, poor gates, off on another trip.

[SmallFurryCreature]

Ah well at least he will rake up his frequent flyer miles.

The company kingsoft in chinese only with no option to change to english it seems. Found a dictionary type program that is sold in an english version but no english pages.

However a few keyword sprung out. Linux for one. You see it seems this office suit runs on linux, this is significant because it is only hinted at in the forbes article. It means that they are not only replacing the office suite but the OS itself as well, since MS office doesn't run on linux they must have been using windows, and since this product seems only to run on linux and not on windows.

Can anyone with an understanding of chinese or with better googling skills confirm this (that wps office2003 runs only on linux)?

Also is this office product opensource or closed source?

And finally, is it any good?

Re:Awh, poor gates, off on another trip.

[SmallFurryCreature]

mmm, but I didn't say anything about open/closed being good or evil. I just asked in the interest of completness. Why do I ask? Perhaps I should have explained. Openoffice and projects like it have trouble competing with MS because of installed userbase, support, and mainstream awareness. A huge orginasation like the chinese goverment, you don't get much bigger then the chinese on this planet, could be a nice boost to an open document format.

Maybe if this product becomes widespread enough in china it might even force MS to include support for its document format into office (to allow MS office users to read chinese documents) instead of the way it is now that everyone making an office suite has to figure out how to read and write the closed MS office document format. And yes I do know that RTF is a full widely supported open document format, ever tried sending someone an rtf one? They think it is a virus and please send a .doc version instead so they open it in word.

Any Competition to Microsoft Office is Good

[gellenburg]

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.

Misread this as

[GillBates0]

Li Xue, a spokeswoman for Kingsoft, told Reuters the government bought 50,000 copies of WPS software in 2002, but declined to give a value for the purchase.

Li Nux, a spokesperson for Kingsoft told Reuters the government bought 50,000 copies of WPS software in 2002, but declined to give a value for the purchase.

I propose she change her last name to Nux, good for business. But in the long haul, Nix may be better....more names to choose from for the kids: Sco Yu Nix come here, you deserve a good spanking for that you naughty boy..take that *slap**slap*.

Upgrades

[florin]

'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'

Re:microsoft is dying and gates is leaving the shi

[Tpenta]

Also according to yahoo.com, Bill still owns 1,168,499,336 shares in MSFT. 6 million is neither here nor there,

Tp.

In Beijing Linux is everywhere

[clueless123]

I happen to be in Beijing right now (just visiting). This week I've gone to a lot of shopping malls and computer stores looking arround, and I can say there is a *whole* lot of Linux out here. I Guess that M$softs antipiracy efforts here have backfired bigtime, now PHB's (at least in the corporate environment I am working at) are thinking twice before using pirated copies of MS. Considering that a copy of Windoze cost as much as 1/2 a months salary for a full-time programer, it is now very appealing to move to linux.

Re:In Beijing Linux is everywhere

[PorscheDriver]

Whaddya mean?! I live in the UK, I am a programmer, and a "Fully Legitimate, Shrink Wrapped edition of Windows XP, complete with Product Activation" [he says, carefully avoid the word 'copy' - watch what you say clueless123...], still costs me half a months salary :-)

Is Office Fragmentation really good ??

[leoaugust]

I just noticed that they have a homegrown version for the Office Software ...

No comments on whether that is Open Source or Open Formats or not .... And no idea of whether it is going to be compatible with Open Office and MS Office ....

Unless the chinese are adopting the "Linux Mindset" I don't think that this is necessarily a good thing .... If they are forcing an almost failed software on more than a billion people just by regulatory fiat, how could it be good ?? ....

What they should be adopting is not something that is NOT Microsoft, but something that is "effectively" BETTER than MS Products .... I don't know that WPS Office even approaches there ...

and the chinese can't get there by rejecting the linux mindset and copying the Microsoft strategy of denying free choice ....

just my two cents worth ...

Phear my leet googling skillz...

[benjamindees]

Wikipedia Definition of WPS Office

Article about Kingsoft

Re:Good example

[mikolas]

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.

No, they're locked in.

[Colin Smith]

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.

Re:No, they're locked in.

[aled]

Sorry but Novell didn't invent Active Directory. They didn't invented the directory service concept either. They did invented their own directory service a couple of year before Microsoft did AD (called NDS or something).

Competition helps open source software

[dwheeler]

If China continues down this path, this could be very helpful to Open Office and other open source software office suites.

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.

Re:Good example

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the last repressive, dictatorial governments on the planet is using Linux.

Really ? I thought the Bush administration is running MS Windows.

Re:Good example

[gusilu]

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.

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 :)) and get recognition for it.

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.

reading comprehension: not a switch from MS Office

[dangermouse]

The article does not say that the government upgraded from Microsoft Office. It says that they upgraded from an earlier version of the same software:

The Ministry of Commerce, the Foreign Ministry and the National Security Bureau and other governmwent departments had upgraded to WPS Office2003 from an earlier version developed by domestic software maker Kingsoft Co, the People's Daily newspaper reported.

The big story seems to be that "it was the first large-scale software upgrade in government offices," which is really just not very interesting.

It isn't whether you can do it

[Colin Smith]

It's how you pay for it. Microsoft is already paid for with large discounts *if you take the lot*.

If you don't take the lot, it gets expensive, and you already have the stuff in place so it's not as if you can stop paying.

With the new MS pay as you go licensing deals that may change, I don't know but the Linux vendors need to find a way round the license bundling.

Drivers

[mcgroarty]

Outside of China, there's an excellent benefit from China swarming all over Linux: This means there will be Linux support out of the gate for those strange, cheap, no-name peripherals you see in plain little boxes all over the computer stores. This means less reverse-engineering Windows drivers, and less hair pulling at trying to get specs from engineers all the way across the globe.

Re:Good example

[mrd_yaddayadda]

One of the last repressive, dictatorial governments on the planet is using Linux. Yay. I hear that Osama Bin Laden uses Linux too, but I haven't seen a story there.

What a bloody awful first post.

Moving on, the real way to look at this is that the two most populous countries on the planet (China and India) are both seriously looking at open source, free software and other non-MS software organisations for their governmental and other agencies.

Whatever you, me or anyone else thinks about MS, Linux, FreeBSD, MSOffice, and whatever else is really irrelevant. It's great to see people now having the choice which really hasn't been around (excepting other even more expensive options *cough* Apple *cough*).

Will the Chineese respect the GPL?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will all this work with GPL'ed software be lost because the Chineese govenment maynot respect the GPL license? They have shown in the past they don't have much consideration for others copyright laws. I hope this isn't the case.

Re:Chinese office

[UnknowingFool]

Er? The Chinese have no alphabet like Western languages. Their system of language is based on ideograms where one ideogram represents a word or part of a word. It's the same with Korean, Japanese, Mayan, Egyptian, etc.

Ironic

[Mark_MF-WN]

Ironic, isn't it? A communist nation is doing more to protect the free market (by fighting a monopoly) than any of the supposedly capitalistic nations.

Seriously, when did we all hand our collective balls over to the monopolies and give up the whole idea of a "free market" and "encouraging competition"?

directories...

[ecalkin]

i believe that the directories that we are talking about are based on the x.500 spec.

novell was first with NDS, Netware Directory Services sometimes called ediretory. very close to the x.500 spec including some stuff that they put into it but recommended that you don't use (r/o partitions come to mind).

ms was *very* late to the dirctory part with ads, Active Directory Services. this is an expansion of the MS domain model. it appears to not be as x.500 complient as it should.

if you want a comparision of these, there is no beter experiment than hooking up 4 or 5 servers and building something out of directory services. if you can't do that, look to the microsoft annoucement that they put 2.5 million objects in an ads network. then compare to the brainshare demo where novell put over a *billion* objects into nds.

eric

Too late for Microsoft: biz dies because of change

[nozpamming]

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.

Microsoft Piracy and Linux

[synergy3000]

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.

Officially we run free software. unofficially...

[blastedtokyo]

In China the reality is that software is considered free (as in beer). The lone exception is the government, who in its quest to join the WTO, look like a good citizen, etc. needs to look like they support international copyright standards to a reasonable degree. That's why they finally started buying licenses just a few years ago.

With this move, they can stop paying Microsoft licenses and look like they're legit. Heck, they even look trendy by supporting open source. Then someone can just go to the any subway station and pick up for $1US a copy of Windows, a copy of VMWare and a copy of Office.

Voila...They no longer need to pay MSFT. gain support from the open source community, and still run the software they're used to using.

Re:reading comprehension: not a switch from MS Off

[Bushcat]

Kingsoft is a major player in China, and also known elsewhere in the world for its Chinese dictionary solutions. See dictionaries here and Kingsoft here.

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.

Re:Good example

[Kamel Jockey]

Linux and communism have a lot in common with each other, in terms of their ideals of shared ownership.

Bullshit, unlike communism, Linux actually works.

I don't know why it hasn't happend yet

[Felinoid]

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.

Re:Good example

[Unregistered]

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.

Re:MS Office and Linux

[AstroDrabb]

Actually, MS Office XP runs perfectly under Cross Over Office. It also runs Photoshop 7 perfectly. Disney actually paid to have Photoshop 7 working since many more movies are being done with Linux and most graphical artists have Photoshop training. I just set this up for my brother-in-law who is a photographer and said he "needed" photoshop, I switched him to Red Hat 9 with OOo 1.1 (very good startup times) and Photoshop 7. It runs great. There is no slow down since Wine is NOT an emulator, it runs at native speed. I personally use Gimp 1.3.x and OOo-1.1 for all my needs. However, if you "need" one of these bigger MS Windows only apps, Cross Over works great for many of them. There is also WineX-3.x that runs more then 500 of the top games.

Re:reading comprehension: not a switch from MS Off

[darekana]

Actually the Microsoft IME (Input method env) is fairly sophisticated for Japanese. It is getting competitive with ATOK. I think ATOK's market share is probably in the toilet these days. Their software is better, but not so much better that it is worth paying for. Well maybe if you have to transcribe tons of text, but certainly not necessary for the average person. Just like browsers, MS will control the IME on its own platform.

The reason MS is having trouble in China is not because their software is bad, it's because China, like Japan and Korea don't want to hand their markets to a foreign company on a platter.

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.

MS is not handicapped, guess what!, they have Japanese and Chinese people working for them. They have large offices in both countries and have brought many Chinese and Japanese language experts to America to work in their research labs. They know about i18n and they know about typography. They have spent tons of money on buying people that know about it.

MS does make mistakes and does do stupid things, but they aren't quite as ignorant as you seem to make them out to be.

Re:microsoft is dying and gates is leaving the shi

[An Onerous Coward]

I would be tempted to chalk it up to one of the following:

1) Diversification.

B) The realization that, for years now, it hasn't been possible for Microsoft's stock to perform the way it did in the eighties.

4) Bill needs some cash on hand for the purchase of one or more of the following:

- Jet skis.
- Tahitian slave girls.
- A formidable nuclear arsenal.
- Twizzlers.

Re:Chinese office

[Beowabbit]

Their system of language is based on ideograms where one ideogram represents a word or part of a word. It's the same with

• Korean
  Nope. Korean used to be written in Chinese characters, but now all writing in North Korea and almost all writing in South Korea is alphabetic. (Chinese characters are occasionally scattered into highbrow writing in South Korea, but it's still mostly alphabetic.) Korean writing arranges the letters into syllables in such a way that the syllables sort of look like Chinese characters, though -- quite pretty. (Link with examples)
• Japanese
  Japanese writing is a mix of phonetic and ideographic writing (with the ideograms borrowed from Chinese; they're called kanji, which is just Japanese-borrowed-from-Chinese for "Chinese characters").
• Mayan
  Unless there's recent news I've missed, Mayan hieroglyphs haven't been deciphered yet. (I guess people could still have an idea whether they're likely to be phonetic or likely to be ideographic based on the variety and distribution of symbols, though -- I don't know much about them.)
• Egyptian
  Egyptian is a fascinating mix of ideographic and phonetic writing. There are symbols that are used only for their sound, and symbols that are used only for their meaning, and lots of symbols that can be used rebus-like for either. I found a neat page about it at http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm .

(The main point I wanted to make is that modern Korean isn't ideographic, and Japanese and Egyptian are only partly so.)

Screenshots!

[TheNarrator]

Well I don't read chinese but my clicking instincts are pretty good. Here are some screenshots of the software. Looks just like Office. Very Impressive.. It looks like it runs on KDE.

Screenshots

Re:I have to respond to this

[pmather]

These are the exact same tactics Hitler used to keep his people focused

Hitler developed an open source office suite?

Re:Aren't the chinese pirates anyway?

[DNS-and-BIND]

My, we're politically correct today, aren't we? Ever been to China? Didn't think so! I have. Let's just say that in a country where people make $4/day, thousand-dollar office suites aren't exactly going to fly off the shelves. I have yet to see an actual licensed copy of any software in any factory I've inspected so far. What I have seen is the markets that have CDs on sale for $1 each.

But it has its good points, too...anyone want a copy of Gigli or Hulk on DVD?