Slashdot Mirror
Israel Suspends MS Office Purchases For Now
case_igl writes "The Seattle Times is reporting 'that in an apparent showdown over price, Israel's government has suspended purchases of Microsoft Office software and is encouraging the development of an open-source alternative.' The Finance Ministry has cooperated with Sun Microsystems and IBM in designing the Hebrew-language version of OpenOffice software, a freely distributed open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. The spokeswoman said the government was unhappy with Microsoft's refusal to sell individual programs from its standard Office package, which includes e-mail, spreadsheet and word-processing applications. Microsoft representatives in Israel did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment." The Associated Press article is carried on many other sites as well.
This is definitely a move that will help push Linux further into everyday use. I wonder how soon Microsoft/Isreal will 'compromise' to help make the deal?
What OOo needs most is more support from powerpoint. We are forced to buy a copy of Office for every computer because we use powerpoint for so much. Features such as hyperlinks to other presentations and exit effects are show stoppers for openoffice.org.
Honestly, as far as the computer is concerned, what difference if characters being displayed are displayed to be read left to right or right to left?
now...CODING from right to left would make for some fun revamping of parsers and parser generators, but nothing that would be all THAT complicated.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Nah, coding is easy.
What's interesting is if this is just a bargaining chit being used by israel to make MSFT drop thier price, Just like Thailand did!
Use the promotional code "LINUX" and get thousands off your Microsoft installation costs!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I wonder if this thread, we'll get posts from people who think it's COMPLETELY unreasonable and communist of Israel to stop supporting Microsoft, a foreign company, just because Microsoft has failed to provide the support the government of Israel demanded for their country's official language.
It's happened every other time this subject's come up; it's probably a matter of time..
-- Super Ugly Ultraman
Once we see what the Israeli government deploy on their desktops we will know if this is for real, or just a crude negotiation technique.
We know there will be a lot of posts about "yeah! Stick it to the Man!" and "Microsoft sucks! Serves them right!" going on. But let's think a bit deeper into this. I like the actual reasons Israel is saying "no, we're not going to live under your tyrannical rule. We will search out other options". That has been a major argument over the years..."everyone uses Office, so do we". Well that's not the case anymore. Microsoft is still trying to strongarm its customers by any means neccessary. It started with the OS, then to the nutty licensing, and now by their refusal to split up Office (which if you recall used to be a collection of software you could buy individually). Good for Israel. Now...what next? Will other large companies go "hm...well it worked for them. Let's try it too" or will they just go "they're crazy" and continue to be lemmings like most of humanity is?
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
More power to them! Microsoft Word's default Hebrew fonts are non-existent, and the alternative Hebrew fonts aren't very good. Nor are any of the office products very good at inputing right-to-left text. I hope the improvements to openoffice will make their way to other countries.
I would assume that the main benefits would be of most use to (in order):
Other Semitic languages such as Arabic, Syriac, and Ethiopian
Other right-left languages, such as Farsi.
Noticing a pattern here... Ironically enough, these improvements are likely to help develop the software for those that Israel considers to be their enemies (the Arab world and Persia, being Iran and parts of Iraq, Turkey, and Afghanistan).
This is not a bad thing. In the end, Israeli engineers may work side-by-side Iranian engineers on open source projects, and these engineers may develop personal respect for eachother.
The Israeli political system is paralized when it comes to peace, IMO, due to the low margin (2%) that parties need in order to qualify for the Knesset. This is why the current gov't is so dependent on the radical right-wing parties such as the National Religious Party (which many Israelis regard as fascist). Yet they are not stupid, and this unilaterial suggestion on their part has been a long time coming (if you read the Israeli press, you should have seen it at least a year ago, if not more).
The ONLY hope of peace is for enough people on all sides of the conflict to get to know eachother and develop personal respect. They don't have to respect eachothers' governments. Hell, as an American, I don't have much respect for MY government! But in the end, personal respect is the way towards peace. Collaboration is one way to do this. FOSS is one venue for collaboration.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
While I would not like to overstate this, an open source project could be an small opportunity to bring Jewish and Muslim developers together. They share a common goal of wanting software that can handle text that reads right to left. Anything, even something as small as an open source project, that can help bring people together in the Middle East has to be a good thing. While open source is not a magic elixir for world problems, working together is always a useful step.
Think global, act loco
Is the money that I make forcing people to buy things that they don't need (for example, an entire office license if all they need is Outlook) worth the money that I lose when people start flocking to free alternatives when they don't like I'm offering?
Microsoft (or any company for that matter) stands on very shaky ground when the market starts going in a different direction and they refuse to be flexible. This is just like the RIAA and file sharing. If the RIAA in the mid 90's when CD burners were about to hit the market had dropped the price of CD's, and offered a legitimate electronic distribution method, things like Napster would not have been such a big hit. They created unrest in the market by not being flexible and giving people what they want to buy, for the price they want. The same thing is now happening to MS. What does MS office have that OpenOffice doesn't? Nothing that mattered to Israel. So when they were forced to pay for something they didn't want or need, they looked for an alternative and found it.
Unless MS shapes up this will continue to happen and happen more rapidly. Mac OS, Linux, and all other *NIX will only gain market share as they become the viable alternative.
Just compare some of the licensing of Mac OS to MS. The new, fully loaded version of OSX? ~$130. The new fully loaded version of Windows XP? ~$200. The new fully loaded version of OSX Server? ~$1000 for unlimited users. The new fully loaded Windows server 2003? ~$4000 with 25 users. And that is not to mention Linux which is fully loaded for free!
They can't sustain this for long before something breaks.
SCO.com uses Linux
What M$ will end up doing is waffling on the price down the road somewhere and try to schmooze Israel into coming back to them. It then becomes a matter of whether or not Israel is disenchanted enough with M$ to tell them to go away or if they'll recant and take the new deal.
Yep, but as MS learned with Munich and, as you pointed out, India, unless MS plays their cards just right, they could lose anyway. Too many people are too pissed off at the way they've been jerked around in the past, so many are willing to suffer a little pain and even higher costs to break free.
Microsoft's high-handed tactics of the last decade are coming back to haunt it. Not in a really significant way, just yet. A few thousand copies of Office here and a few thousand copies of Windows there aren't going to cause immediate suffering for a company of Microsoft's size and health, but as more organizations make the switch it will become easier and easier for others to make the switch.
The goal of F/OSS developers isn't to combat Microsoft, but it's becoming increasingly clear that what will motivate the entry of F/OSS into the mainstream is widespread dissatisfaction with Microsoft's tactics, rather than anything related to the relative quality of the software, or even price.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Please don't forget that your government is one of the few that lets you freely state that without hunting you down like a criminal.
The truth shall set you free!
How big is the market for a Hebrew-enabled office? It can't be that big outside of a few Jewish schools, some of the Orthodox community in the US, and Israel itself.
It just sounds like a pricing game to me -- MS wanting (needing?) to sell the whole package in Hebrew to make any money keeping up their translation and the Israeli government objecting to the provisions of the seller.
It wouldn't surprise me if MS just decided to drop Hebrew altogether; it's a limited growth market, and the number of people who speak English in addition to Hebrew has to be huge, and with the demands of document portability, many would likely switch to the English version anyway vs. some other version which supports Hebrew.
I know, I know, it's another terrible example of American corporations exterminating a local culture in the name of profits, but that's just a political interpretation of economic reality.
This was one of the false arguments laid by the Oslo people: let us reach for a temporary solution, the two people will get to know each other, and surely will respect each other so much that war will not be possible. Well, guess what, it didn't work.
Funny really, that by 1999 when the final status accords should have been signed by the Netanyahu government, they weren't. How long is tempoary? During that time (Oslo 1993-2000), exclusively Jewish settlements in the West Bank doubled. The Oslo period was seen by both sides as a con. Palestinians got to know Israelis during that time as bosses, and Israelis got to know Palestinians as cheap labour, or a place to shop on shabat. I don't know what would have worked. Maybe the natural order of things is for Jews to rule over Arabs, whites over blacks, whites over reds. Was that your point?
that's precisely the problem .. only a few fonts .. for years Microsoft has been stripping down the Unicode set for many languages and effectively restricting what can be developed within their core O/S and "productivity" products .. Hence a fresh start with OpenSource allows *many* more developers and native speakers within a country develop their own fonts and contribute them back in to lower level applications.
(1) Are you claiming that the murders were part of a Palestinian conspiracy? Because usually, the people promising peace are not the people doing the murdering. Is that the case here? "The Palestinians" are no more a united, homogenous group than are "The Israeli Jews".
(2) Why were the Hebron settlers murdered, and were their murderers brought to justice by any common, civilised sense of the term? What often happens is that in the understandable thirst for retribution, the actual reasons for the violence are trivialised, and the social order is suspended or abandoned- which only helps bring about more violence.
This is not a bad thing. In the end, Israeli engineers may work side-by-side Iranian engineers on open source projects, and these engineers may develop personal respect for eachother. ... But in the end, personal respect is the way towards peace. Collaboration is one way to do this.
I wish I could go along with that, but it seems like a little bit of wishful thinking. Geekdom is the ultimate meritocracy -- politics is not. In computer science, you can tell a good solution from a bad solution -- it's all right there in front of you, and people who can come up with good solutions will be respected for those solutions regardless of race, religion, etc. In politics, what determines a good solution or a bad solution is the power of the person carrying out that solution and their ability to sway the public into thinking it was the right way to go all along.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
it costs money to turn peoples houses into rubble with tanks and rockets
Actually it takes US taxpayers money to do that...
The failure of the peace process in Palestine goes further than that. I don't believe there will ever be peace until the Palestinian people achieve some level of economic prosperity. When a people have something tangible to lose, they naturally shy away from violence. A prosperous Palestinian economy would isolate the terrorists to the most extreme ideologues.
That being said, I don't know what steps Israel might take to foster such a situation (I believe that massive public works projects do more to hurt than to help), and I certainly categorize Arafat as a poverty pimp, who has more to gain by keeping his people in poverty.
The best start that I can recommend would be the creation of programs that would teach the advanced farming techniques so successful in Israel to the Paelstinians.
Have the balls to go poke around MEMRI.
Some prime examples of "progressive Islamic thought":
Iranian Daily: 'Extremist Jews Plotting to Assassinate Chirac,' Mossad Agents Behind Najaf Blast
Three Saudi Dailies Publish Government Official's Op-Ed: 'Jews are Masters at Manipulating the Media, Money, World Organizations'
Based on Koranic Verses, Interpretations, and Traditions, Muslim Clerics State: The Jews Are the Descendants of Apes, Pigs, And Other Animals
And of course, there is nothing like the official sermons of the PLO, er, Palestinian Authority, where such great statements are uttered with the full knowledge of the PLO:
"This is the fate that Allah has bestowed upon us, people of Palestine, that we be worthy of struggling and giving our souls on this good and blessed land... Blessings to our Shahids. Blessings to our Shahids who sacrifice their souls easily for the sake of Allah. Blessings to our Shahids who were burned yesterday in their cars" (referring to suicide care bombers, apparently)
And here:
""We tell them: in as much as you love life - the Muslim loves death and martyrdom. There is a great difference between he who loves the hereafter and he who loves this world. The Muslim loves death and [strives for] martyrdom".
"No preacher or sermonizer has right to begin his words without blessing all our Shahids... The Jews cannot influence the actions of our youth and children. But for you, Allah has chosen Shahada... Allah had honored our youth... by choosing you and by choosing from among you the Shahids... Is the Shahid dead like other dead, which requires us to offer condolences and mourn with his family, friend and relatives? Or is the Shahid enjoying virtues and the ability to perform miracles, which gives us the right to congratulate the Shahid and his family?... We have the right to congratulate the Shahids' families, and not extend condolences and sorrow of our Shahids, if they [sacrifice themselves] to Allah... But the Shahid is spared the agony of death. This is one of the miracles of the Shahid. Is it not enough that the Shahid weds 72 black eyed [virgins]?... When the Shahid sees the grace of martyrdom and death for the sake of Allah he will wish to return to this world to be killed in it ten times... The Shahid - is it enough for him that he does not feel the blow of the sword or the pain of death or of the killing rather, as one of you feels a [wasp] sting..."
"A young man said to me: 'I am 14 years old, and I have four years left before I blow myself up'... We, the Muslims on this good and blessed land, are all - each one of us - seekers of Martyrdom... The Koran is very clear on this: The greatest enemies of the Islamic nation are the Jews, may Allah fight them... Blessings for whoever assaulted a soldier... Blessings for whoever has raised his sons on the education of Jihad and Martyrdom; blessings for whoever has saved a bullet in order to stick it in a Jew's head..."
"O brother believers, the criminals, the terrorists - are the Jews... They are the ones who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: 'Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands, and will humiliate them and will help you to overcome them... The Jews are like a [gas] pedal - as long as you step on it with your foot, it doesn't move, but if you lift your foot from it, it hurts you and punishes you. This is the case of the Jews."
"Religion of peace" my ass.
Bundling is just another word for profit maximizing. Microsoft makes more money by bundling, even just slightly. The newspaper example is best used. A wants just the sports section and is willing to pay 30c for it. B just wants entertainment & the front section and wants to pay 40c for it. If each of them buy it, they may 70c total, but if they can charge 50c for both people, they make a dollar.
The point is that Microsoft is trying to milk everyone for more than they're worth. Israel isn't doing anything wrong beyond saying "why are we choosing Microsoft if their support is sub-par. Why shouldn't we find a better prices solution that is completely compatible". Microsoft has to be competative (with free) or convince more lemmings to follow them off the cliff.
-M
It is not the political system in israel which is responsible for the right's ascent, but a recognition that the peace process was nothing more than a national-scale con-job. The palestinians decieved israel, by promissing peace, while maintaining a constant, low intensity, level of murdering Israelly civilians.
The Oslo agreements and the resulting violence were nothing more than a result of the Israelly left's stupidity and blind-optimism whenever the word peace is involved, while confronted with a clever, hateful and murderous opponent (the PLO, later PA).
Yes, the Palestinians didn't manage to stop all the suicide bombers. But don't pretend that Isreal didn't use every shred of opportunity it got to strike back at the Palestinians as well, closing borders, isolating settlements, replenishing the jewish settlement, creating new ones.
There was no real desire for peace from the Israeli either, just peaceful assimilation. To reduce the Palestinians to a bunch of small reservations with no real power, much like what happened to the native indians in the US.
That failed, and failed miserably. Now they want to wall them in and isolate them by force. While it may keep them apart, it'll also stigmatize the entire situation more. What's next, all Palestinians allowed to move among the Israeli to wear a mark? Like the Jews under Hitler? Don't say it can't happen...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Only in Seattle, where MS is a good neighbor, would any "journalist" say this is "apparent showdown over pricing"
Someone has not been paying attention, perhaps willfully so, apparently.
It's over features that Israel offered to PAY for, and MS blew them off for years.
It's about lack of customer support, and MS arrogance... That OOffice just happens to be a 95+% replacement for Word (today), and happens to be Free in both senses of the word, is just a bonus.
The IT industry is shifting away from Microsoft
Comment In the beginning there was Microsoft. Then it exploded
By Charlie Demerjian: Sunday 28 December 2003, 11:31
EVERY SO often, there is a big shift in an industry. The shifts are not usually visible until long after they've happened, making you look back and say: "Oh yeah, things were different back then".
We are experiencing a major IT industry shift right now, and if you know where to look you can actually see it as it happens. This shift is all about Microsoft and open source.
Until very recently, Microsoft owned everything in the personal computer business, both low and high on the food chain. The low end was occupied by Palm, the high end by Sun, IBM and others. In the vast soft middle, there was Microsoft and only Microsoft.
Everyone who challenged it was bought out, cheated out of the technology, or generally beaten into the ground with dirty tricks, by ruthless competition, or on rare occasions, with a better product. Listing the failures would consume more column inches than a person could read in a year.
Netscape, Stac, Wordperfect, Novell, and others are among the notable casualties. Those that technically survived are ghosts of their former selves.
Just as the press proclaims the inability of anyone to challenge the Redmond beast, control is slipping from Microsoft. As with any company faced with a huge loss of market share, Microsoft is acting predictably, pretending it is not happening, and putting on a smiley face when asked about prospects. On the inside, Microsoft is as scared as hell.
One of the richest companies on earth, run by one of the richest people on earth afraid? What can you mean?
Hung, Drawn and Quartered
To put things in perspective, Microsoft has always performed better each quarter than the one before. Whenever the financial types settle on quarterly earnings, Microsoft always manages to pull a few more cents per share out of their hat, and beat those earnings. The collective bunch of jackals and worms that are known as 'Wall Street' sit slack jawed in amazement, and give half hearted golf claps. Rinse and repeat every quarter, including the analysts' 'amazement'.
How it does this is no trick. It has profit margins on its two major products of over eighty per cent. The rest of the products, from handhelds to MSN and the Xbox are all horrific money losers. Its finances are so opaque and badly presented, that it can shuffle money around from one part of the company to another without anyone noticing. Make too much money one quarter? Stash it in the closet labeled investments, or write off some losses. Not making the numbers? Cash in some assets and make a 'profit'.
Overall, it has been able to show a smooth earnings curve, and surprise on the upside every time it reports a quarter. Monopolies and almost no cost to make your physical product other than R&D has its advantages.
Corporations cry Linux
About a year ago, things started to change. The cries that Linux would dethrone Microsoft remained the same, but there was a shift in the corporate reaction to those cries. CxOs started to say 'tell me about it'. In a down economy, free is much cheaper than hundreds of dollars, and infinitely more attractive. Linux started gaining ground with real paying customers using it for real work in the real world, really.
Up until then, Microsoft had simply ignored the tuxedoed threat. Then it started reacting with the usual FUD, the Halloween memos, various white papers and clumsily purchased studies. Somehow, people didn't buy the fact that $1,000 a head was cheaper than free, and so Microsoft had to move on to a different tactic. Since it couldn't buy the company that produced Linux, the GPL prevented the usual embrace and extend, and people had simply grown to hate Microsoft for all the pain they had been caused over the years, the firm found itself in a bind. How do you compete when all your dirty tricks are eith