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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. IMO by mOoZik · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In my opinion, Open Office still has many issues which need to be fixed in future releases to compete with MS Office. I don't know whether that was taken into consideration in this move, but certainly a step in the right direction for open source.

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    A blog like any other.
    1. Re:IMO by rebeka+thomas · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Certainly. You can look at it from anywhere between two extremes. "Open Office still does not compete with MS Office feature for feature" and "Open Office is not as bloated as MS Office".

      Not everyone needs all of the features MS Office "Offers". It's just another product with a wide range of features available to users, and it would be insane to suggest every user needed all features.

      More than likely the Israeli decision went to OOo because it contained the right features, or enough of the right ones.

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      RST
    2. Re:IMO by croddy · · Score: 5, Insightful
      I'm fairly sure the decision was based on Microsoft's failure to support Hebrew in MS Office for MacOS, despite supporting other right-to-left languages. this was mentioned in another /. story noting that Israel had suspended all contracts with Microsoft.

      I guess MS can't get away with cutting too many corners anymore ...

    3. Re:IMO by October_30th · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Are you trying to say that the ability to import and export documents in different formats is irrelevant and everybody should just use OO instead? "Just forget all those five-year old documents. Who needs to see them anymore"? Your clients/collaborators are using Word and the OO export doesn't work? "It's not OOs fault - it's theirs for not using OO instead of the closed but de facto standard word processor. Refuse to collaborate with them until they 'get it'."

      What dreamland are you living in?

      Functionality is useless if you can't view your old files.

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      The owls are not what they seem
  2. People are stupid by rebeka+thomas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm reminded of when a large australian company changed to an OSS desktop solution, and MS decried this as "a blow for choice in the market". No explanation of how this could be possible, but everything is sound bites, a mere snippet of text that cannot possibly convey any real meaning of a situation.

    "The ... agency has selected an immature and unproven software package" could well be applied to anyone looking towards Longhorn.

    Few will make that leap of judgment to understand the hypocrisy.

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    RST