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Israeli Ministry of Commerce Picks OO.org Over MS

Posted by timothy on from the left-to-right dept.

CaptainT writes "According to this article in The Register Microsoft office was replaced by Open Office in the Israeli employment agency. MS scorns the defection... This follows current Israeli antitrust legislation and the recent release by IBM and Sun of Hebrew support in OpenOffice.org. Is the Israeli Defence Force going to follow?"

5 of 611 comments (clear)

  1. Re:IMO by October_30th · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, one thing that completely stopped OO adaptation in our lab was that the math symbols always came out garbled when importing or exporting Word files.

    --
    The owls are not what they seem
  2. Some "behind the scenes" by Sun · · Score: 5, Informative

    The specific office moving to OO do not maintain their own computers. They are on contract from IBM, and IBM preferred OO to Word.

    The contract is global, and the ministry does not pay more (or less) because of it. MS received quite some scorn over that, as their initial press release was claiming this is going to cost 50$/station. When the correction came in that OO was used rather than star office, their corrected response was seeked. They declined to comment.

    Another twist is that the Mac angle was not raised, not even once. I believe The Register put it in because they were the first to flag that.

  3. Re:Windows Office 97 not good enough for MS? by cmallinson · · Score: 4, Informative
    Having "the features of Office 97 at best" is also how I would describe office 2003.

    Do others think that MS Office has added many new core features since then (and I'm not talking about getting clipart from the web)? My mother has been using MS Word exclusively for 8 hours a day since version 3.0. She knows and uses all of the shortcuts (she does not even use a mouse), and all of the features. I recently upgraded her from 97 to 2002. She has read the manuals, and can't find anything new that she would use.

  4. Re:OpenOffice.org Imitating MS? by hdparm · · Score: 5, Informative

    OpenOffice.org is not slow - takes time to start but later on works OK. It's not bloatware either. Insert image of tens of KB in size into oowriter and save the result in MS Word format. Check the document size - it'll be around the size of the image itself. Now do the same using MS Office 2000. How many MB is that .doc big now?

  5. Re:This is pocket money by muyuubyou · · Score: 4, Informative
    Israel population: 6 million
    United States population: 290 million


    European Union: 380+ million
    India: 1.05 billion
    China: 1.27 billion (American billion = 10^9)