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."

Comments

More than just convenience

[the man with the pla]

I am an Isreali citizen living in the United States. It's true that I as a professional do almost all of my work in English. But I am writing to say that being able to use my native hebrew means an awful lot to me and my family. It's not a matter of convenience, it touches on our religous and cultural beliefs. I am very glad to see the government take this action.

Re:More than just convenience

[twistedcubic]

No disrespect, but you can get OpenOffice for free, which supports Hebrew, as people are saying. So if Microsoft gets cut off, your options are still the same-- use OpenOffice or another word processor that supports Hebrew. You should make the transition today, and tell everyone you know! :)

Re:No Apple Support

[Delphiki]

Apple does support Hebrew. Microsoft does not support Hebrew in their Mac software.

The real reason

[Anonymous Coward]

They were pretty happy that MS products didn't work on the sabbath. What really got them mad was that they didn't work any other day either.

Re:Software internationalization - is Hebrew hard?

[jrumney]

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.

Re:or...

[Blondie-Wan]

m$ hates god

Of course. MS sees God as competition. ;)

Re:Foolish on both sides

[Frostalicious]

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.

Don't get too excited

[hendrix69]

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.