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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.
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.
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