Brazil Moves Away From Microsoft

An anonymous reader writes "Citing economic as well as social reasons, Brazil's government is opting to move away from Windows, opting instead for Open Source (read: Linux) solutions. Interestingly, Microsoft's representative in Brazil decries this as a movement away from freedom and choice..."

Comments

When should a stock holder start to worry

[Mrs. Grundy]

We have heard a lot of stories about people, states, and countries moving away from Microsoft. Is this a trend? If you are a manager of a fund heavily invested in MS, or an individual investor, when does this news begin to worry you. In the long run does MS really have a chance when competing against free, well written, well understood software?

Re:When should a stock holder start to worry

[ducomputergeek]

I work as a tech consultant. My degrees are in German and International business. When I spent a year studying in Germany, the college had 2 SuSE linux labs and one Windows lab on their campus. Most students had dual boot Linux and Windows laptops.

The main reason why Linux was being adopted outside of the United States was because of its cost, even with $2.50 per copy for Windows XP in 3rd world nations, linux decreases in cost per unit the more machines you install it upon.

The other reason was SuSE and Mandrake, both European and not from the United States. Which plays well in the EU. There is a mentality amoung many leaders in France and Germany that want to see the "United States of Europe" superpower and waining themselves from Microsoft could give Europe a leg up in technology as Linux catches on in SE Asia and the 3rd world.

Now with SuSE in the hands of a NA company, I wonder how that will impeed linux adoption. Oh course, IBM would love to see this happen as the premiums would return to hardware, not software.

I think Linux will be catching on internationally in the next couple years on desktops big time. It probably will be longer in the United States.

Re:When should a stock holder start to worry

[jsse]

I see this is a trend. A lot of people is moving away, if not moving to Linux, from Microsoft.

A friend of mine called last week asked me for my opinion on choosing J2EE and .NET. That really surpise me as he's working for a all MS s/w house, his entire team knows none other than MS's product, and he's a 100% Microsoft zealot. Turn out they were seriouly considering dropping MS deployment as "Microsoft Server is being too insecure".

I found it amusing: a company who work with Microsoft very closely all these years is being forced to switch, even when they must start from the beginning.

Re:When should a stock holder start to worry

[Ami Ganguli]

I've read the Cringely article, and it's certainly true that MS can do this for a while, but they have to keep some of those going in order to have a long-term business plan.

At some point over the next ten years or so Office and Windows will stop making significant profits (or at least, they'll only make normal ~10% margin). When that happens the share price has to drop, as it's predicated on high margin and high growth.

Of course Balmer and Gates realize this. That's why they've started to prepare shareholders for a different kind of Microsoft. They've started issuing dividends - a sure sign of a stock that's going from high-growth to steady but boring profit. That's part 1 of the plan, and very sensible on their part. Part 2 is harder: make sure the steady but boring profit comes through.

I don't think it's ever happened before that a company with more money than God sees it's main revenue source evaporate. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Can they build up the non-Office, non-Windows part of their business fast enough to avoid imploding?

As well as....

[BWJones]

Citing economic as well as social reasons

We should probably add security reasons, employment reasons, resource reasons, government infrastructure reasons, political reasons, etc....etc...etc...

Although, that said. There is a place for proprietary software and many Microsoft products would meet this need. The problem is that Microsoft spent years being just good enough and out-competing the better alternative in many cases (MacOS) and now it is turning around to bite them in the butt, because Linux based solutions are now in many cases.....good enough.

Of course OS X is still the best solution for most users that I have yet seen, but in the short term, Brazil could likely use their existing CPU hardware infrastructure for Linux as opposed to purchasing new hardware from Apple. Long term costs could most likely be lower with a gradual phasing in of OS X in combination with OSS solutions running on Linux and the use of existing infrastructure on Windows however as a healthy computing ecosystem is diverse.

is this a threat to linux security?

[sbma44]

In recent years Brazil has become the home to a lot of crackers (I believe there was a slashdot article on this recently as well). Presumably moving the government's preferred software solutions will also influence Brazil's populace, through compatibility requirements and civil workers becoming familiar with OSS, then taking that knowledge home.

If Brazil remains a locus of "grayhat" activity, could this mean more resources will be put toward finding Linux exploits? Certainly on the whole Linux is more secure than Microsoft's offerings, but I imagine most would agree that its small userbase has played a part in limiting the number of exploits uncovered.

Wonderful News

[slevin]

This is such wonderful news I can barely stand it. I've spent the whole weekend in a slump because it recently hit me that Microsoft has flat out killed all progress in browser technologies for the mainstream consumer. Their admission to make no more changes to IE until the next revision of the OS is terribly sad. For a brief shining moment one could dream of a world of human beings working together and exchanging ideas. But for the most part, the internet has been reduced to an alternate way to watch CNN.

Individial centric social structures (such as capitalism) work well in many ways, but they are very vulnerable through brainwashing of individuals (advertising) and the abuse of the commons(spam). Governments are the forces of socialism which keep things in check. I'm giddy at seeing this actually happening.(Even though I am deeply sad that my own dear Home of the Brave dropped the ball on this in a fearfully troubling manner.) I pray to any higher power that will answer me that this sort of thing will continue until it is safe and productive to have a good idea again.

Well, of course governments are doing this

[cemkaner]

We keep reading about the yet-another-government that said "oh, dear, Microsoft is sooooo expensive, we should use Linux instead."

And then there's an item in the Wall Street Journal about someone from Microsoft striking a deal with the country's government. They get big discounts, free software, maybe some gifts for the schools, maybe even some investments or jobs.

So if you were running a poor country, why WOULDN'T you threaten to give Microsoft products the boot? It's a negotiation!

Re:Freedom and choice

[Zeinfeld]

I'd like some "freedom and choice" with those Brazilian ladies.

I am sure that if you went to one of the local 'Thermas' you would find both...

I went to Brazillia and watched the open source debate. I think folk in the US are completely missing the plot. First off the Brazillian govt is dependent on Microsoft in the way the US govt is dependent on Cobol, Windows is their legacy infrastructure.

Secondly the big issue for the country at the moment is the balance of payments. The government is calculating that they can get better prices out of Redmond if they apply pressure.

Finally there is a protectionist angle, keeping out big US software companies helps local companies - perhaps.

The software industry has become so melodramatic..

[JavaSavant]

It's odd how software has become akin to daytime television. Every time Microsoft loses a market lately, it's the result of some failure of democracy and Natural Law. If a gas station were to lose it's business to a competitor down the street, would he chalk it up to the oppression of OPEC and chime about how such competition is akin to the spread of fascism in Europe in the 1930's?

I think it goes more to show how Microsoft feels entitled to each and every market they enter, and that they're not trained to respond to the market around them as they're so used to controlling it. If they lose business in some market, it's not because their prices are high and their products are inferior, it's because some other market force "has it in for them."

Re:context people

[IM6100]

Entire segments of the software market have NO Open Source options. Engineering Workstations and high-end CAD and design are examples of this. You can't design a large FPGA and simulate it with any Open Source solution. Well, you probably can, with tools reminiscent of what engineers had in 1985...

Restricting a society to Open Source Only will stunt the economy of that society, limiting them to word processors, spreadsheets, web browsers and an array of similar 'prole' applications.

Sandbox

[bstadil]

I believe it's a bad thing to exclude one party and not the other,

Microsoft has proven that it can not play nice with the other children, and as such has been given a few years timeout

The Best SW for the job is a fallacy.

I recently saw a movie where the head surgeon made all the operation on little children with brain tumors. He was almost let go as this clearly disallowed anyone else to aquire the needed skill set.

Nobody disputed that fact that he was the best.

Re:Theres a typo

[1u3hr]

"Interestingly, Microsoft's representative in Brazil decries this as a movement away from freedom and choice..."
I think the word they were searching for was "Ironically".

I think "predictably".

perspective: Free Trade Area of Americas

[TheUberBob]

Free Trade is a joke of course, but let's put this in perspective of the americas trade zone negotiations. Brazil wants to protect it's financial service and tech areas from U.S. domination/ownership (multinationals/u.s. investors). It wants profits to go to the local economy...it also wants to export agricultural products and protect its farmers. By focusing on linux and local tech, they can expand their influence in south america, and eventually (since lots of thrid world countries realize the inherent problem in giving money to the world richest country) grab IP rights of their own and export tech to the US...or at least drive ridiculous profits down...it's the natural reaction to the way US subsidies for farmers drive profits down worldwide and keep third world countries to a low growth rate (insuring a very very slow development process and much less threat of challenge to US interests/IP/capital from developing nations). The US wants to protect their farmers because it hurts third world countries profits andhelps big business reap the benefits of tech and financial services (third world countries don't have the capital/resources to compete)...so brazil wants their farmers to benefit and to not allow the invasion of US tech and financial services. So the current talks, detailed at BBC, will probably fall through. And since the US is pursuing deals with individual countries, it's in Brazil's best interest to develop their own tech/keep US tech out, independent of the trade agreement. Of course, given the timing, it's a nice warning shot too.

Next move: value freedom

[ciaran_o_riordan]

This is of course great news. Maybe they should talk to Peruvian Congressman Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nunez, the guy that wrote the letter to Microsoft about Peru using Free Software regarding Peru's new "Free Software in Public Administration bill".

Free Software is often better than proprietary software. The OpenSource movement bases it's whole argument on this point. The terms "Free Software" and "OpenSource" usually refer to the same thing, but if people don't value freedom, they won't see a reason not to switch back when a better (low-cost initially) proprietary alternative comes along.

I wonder if this has anything to do with Stallmans recent video talk at a brazillian Free Software conference.