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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."
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.
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.
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)"
how long until
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.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Here are some example Chinese distros:
Red Flag
Cosix
Magic Linux
XTeam
Courtesy of Google (loads of hits on WPS Office):
1 0307/199035.html
http://www.pconline.com.cn/pcedu/soft/office/wps/
It seems that Billy-Boy gotta call George-Boy to get this axis of evil expanded a bit..
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.
MoFscker
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?
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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.
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*.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
'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'
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.
Wikipedia Definition of WPS Office
Article about Kingsoft
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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)
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
- Korean
- Japanese
- Mayan
- Egyptian
(The main point I wanted to make is that modern Korean isn't ideographic, and Japanese and Egyptian are only partly so.)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 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").
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 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 .
Hitler developed an open source office suite?