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Israeli Government Suspends Microsoft Contracts
MartinB writes "According to The Register, in a double blow to Redmond, the Israeli government has both suspended all government contracts with Microsoft until at least the end of 2004, and Israeli Antitrust Authority director general Dror Strum has ruled that Microsoft is subject to US court limitations. At issue in part is Microsoft's refusal to support Hebrew in Mac versions of Office."
I agree that Microsoft is bad etc, etc... however...
It's sad when a country uses its laws to try to force a company to do certain things.
If you don't give us Hebrew, we'll declare you a monopoly! Well, that's bullshit. Laws are laws... either Microsoft is a monopoly by their laws or not. It should have nothing to do with microsoft's decision not to have certain software packages in Hebrew.
This really makes you wonder how Isreal looks at things...
Davak
Hebrew and Arabic are written right to left, except for numbers and snippets of other languages, which are written left to right within the right to left text. This requires Bi-Driectional (BIDI) text support, and is very hard to support correctly and efficiently for read-write programs where the user can just put their cursor anywhere and start typing. Most software either does BIDI correctly or does something resembling it efficiently, seldom both.
That is not the point. The point is that the version of MS Office for MS Windows DOES support right to left. MS Does not want the Mac version to have this feature to force users to use MS Windows over Mac if they want right to left Hebrew in MS Office. So again, it is a monopoly doing what they do best.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
You can either use the operating system's built in text layout widget, which supports all of this correctly with no work, but doesn't give you any control over what's going on, or you can code your own layout engine, giving you complete control, but you'd have to add support for everything yourself. Given the control you'd need for a real word processor, I am sure that MS coded their own layout engine, so it'd be an immense amount of work to add support for bi-directional languages, etc. If MS supports any right-to-left languages already (Arabic, etc.) it shouldn't be any work at all to add support for Hebrew.
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Well, that's bullshit. Laws are laws... either Microsoft is a monopoly by their laws or not.
Well according to the article, a monopoly in Israel is...."any company with 50 per cent market share. Tying is illegal, as is unreasonably refusing a service. violations are considered criminal felonies".
Do I need to convince you that Microsoft has 50% market share on the desktop? I hope not. So they are a monopoly, and thus have additional obligations under Israeli law, like not "unreasonably refusing a service". Therefore the country CAN "use its laws to try to force a company to do certain things". It can force them to provide the service.
I'm not sure on the details of this, but by the article, it seems that Bill Gates is now a criminal in Israel.
The Israeli government is just holding out in order to get a better deal on MS products for the upcoming years. Too much of the government and the army's software is tied too MS for a transition to Linux to take place. Besides, no other platform, sadly, has as good a support of Hebrew as MS. Although it's getting better constantly - the latest OpenOffice, for example, is quite an improvement.
There's also the issue of MS's political power through the US government. Israel gets quite a bit of money from the US and large portions of it are conditioned on the buying of American products with this money. So I wouldn't bet on Israel doing the Munich thing. At least not for a while.
The power of Christ compiles you!
So Yeda offered to take the job upon themsleves. MS does not have to pay anything to add Hebrew. Why does MS still refuse? Could it be they like their Windows platform better than Mac-OS?
Open Office has had Hebrew support for quite some time.
2002 Hebrew OpenOffice Files
Open Office Hebrew HowTo
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This is not defensive, it is offensive. The fact that the settlements still exists and in fact are growing, makes it an offensive campaign. If the Israelis were truly sincere about defence, they would have pulled back to their legitimate borders instead of routinely flouting the UN resolutions and building WMDS(mmmm seems a familiar scenario).