Israel v. Microsoft, Next Round

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Israel v. Microsoft, Next Round

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Saturday January 10, 2004 @06:06PM from the a-tough-guy-eh? dept.

hodet writes "From Haaretz.com, in predictable fashion, looks like a little tough bargaining with Microsoft is all that is needed to get your way. As many predicted after this story, looks like all you have to do is threaten to move to an OSS alternative to make them relent. Maybe it's time to stop getting excited about every little announcement that comes out." The upshot of the story is that Microsoft is willing to split the components of Office in order to sell it to the Israeli government's Finance Ministry. Reader blunte, though, links to a story that discounts the importance of MS's move: "Israel re-iterates: No More MS Software. This is round two. MS has made an effort to reconcile with Israel, and Israel still says No. Israel govt's purchases account for 3-4% of MS Israel's annual revenue."

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still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-10 18:20 · Score: 5, Informative

This was another of Israel's recent problems with microsoft. MS wouldn't implement it even when they offered to pay.
1. Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac by 1u3hr · 2004-01-10 18:59 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  It's not as easy as it sounds.
  There have been Chinese versions of MS Office for almost 10 years. That's a lot harder than alphabetic scripts like Hebrew.
2. Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac by Derivin · 2004-01-10 19:06 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  There are plenty of other languages which read left to right and are supported like Arabic. There are harder asian languages supported: Korean, Japanese, and the worst Chinese.
  Mac OSX supports Hebrew. The real issue is cost, not ease. Working for a speech/language company, it is the total cost of a product, not how hard it is to develop that kills most projects like this.
  We dropped Japanese, not because it was hard (the product was complete and japanese had been done in previous versions). It was dropped because the salary for QA, support, management, OEM sales chain, advertising, and maintanance were just too high. There was very little reuse of staff due to the language, a QA engineer who does not know Japanese (Hebrew) isn't going to be any help. One more language means one more product in the release schedual, which extends the time it takes to make releases and move on to developing the next new killer feature.
  What incentive does MS really have? Some small % of the 4% of their sales in a country (This is Mac specific, not all %4 is Mac). It's a big drop in the bucket, but its not enough to pay for all those people and the potential for derailment of other projects. What is the potential to sell this 'feature' to recoup the cost? HEbrew on Mac Office? Very little to none I'd guess.
  
  No, its not because its 'hard' (and I doubt its that). It's cost verses potential profit. When looking for a reason, look to money first.
Re:Yay! by bww · 2004-01-10 19:38 · Score: 1, Informative

its easy to forget about 'human rights' when humans tend to blow themselves up.
Re:Will they understand now? by TWX · 2004-01-10 19:43 · Score: 4, Informative

"Are they (MS) allowed to screw everybody just because they are the richest company in the world?"

They are quite far from being the richest company in the world. They simply have a lot of liquid assets, and sit in a position that gets them a lot of attention. GM for a while was considered the largest company in the world, but with oil company mergers (Exxon-Mobile anyone?), car company mergers (DaimlerChrysler, combining Daimler, Mercedes Benz, Chrysler, and Mitsubishi Motors), there are a lot of other large, wealthy companies. Microsoft has a lot of money, but if their customer-base as it stands dries up, they don't have a lot of fixed assets.

--
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Re:Buying Office Programs as individual components by Keeper · 2004-01-10 19:56 · Score: 4, Informative

You've always been able to buy each application in the Office suite standalone.

Isreal is complaining that the Office bundle has one or more applications they don't want, but it is more expensive to buy the applications separately than it is to buy the bundle (well, DUH).
Re:3-4% can't be right by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-10 20:27 · Score: 2, Informative

Government expenditures as a share of GDP in the First World, by geographic/cultural zone: Former British Empire: Australia: 36.0% Canada: 40.6% Ireland: 34.4% New Zealand: 36.5% United Kingdom: 40.9% United States: 35.6% Average: 37.3% Germanic Europe: Austria: 51.9% Belgium: 50.2% Germany: 48.6% Luxembourg: 46.1% Netherlands: 47.3% Average: 48.8% Latin Europe: France: 54.0% Italy: 47.7% Portugal: 46.1% Spain: 39.8% Average: 46.9% Scandanavia: Denmark: 55.3% Finland: 49.2% Iceland: 44.6% Norway: 46.7% Sweeden: 58.6% Average: 50.9% Other: Japan: 38.6% Switzerland: 39.9%
Re:Palestinian viruses attacks... by BTWR · 2004-01-10 21:03 · Score: 2, Informative

Americans are dying because of the conflict started by your religious fanatics.

Don't you mean when 7 arab lands invaded ISRAEL the DAY IT WAS CREATED in 1948?

the stealing of Palestinian lands

Don't you mean "the arab lands of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem fully owned by Arabs (Egypt and Jordan) before 1967, yet they refused to give the Palestinians their own state?"

C'mon... i admit Israel can be really tough, too tough. And their system of gov't has a LOT that can be corrected, but anyone who says the arabs are not equally if not more responsible is in huge denial...
Re:Complaints by Drakon · 2004-01-11 01:28 · Score: 2, Informative

Call me a pedant, but Apple Israel offered to foot the localization costs, not Microsoft Israel, the difference being that releasing the source to a subsidiary is completely different from releasing it to a competitors subsidiary.

--
Buttsex.
Re:*offtopic* small problem with windows XP by toddestan · 2004-01-11 04:09 · Score: 2, Informative

I have found XP and 2000 do not like large FAT32 partitions formatted with other programs, for some odd reason. I had an 80GB drive I wanted to format as FAT32, and I tried a couple of non-MS things and XP and 2000 balked. Finally I installed it in a Windows ME machine and formatted it, and now XP likes it just fine. So if you have access to a 95b/98/ME machine, try that.
Re:Something wicked this way comes by drinkypoo · 2004-01-11 04:35 · Score: 2, Informative

You are correct that the example in the grandparent is a complete crock of shit. However, I feel you are somewhat off base on the issue of retraining, which is a serious issue. In most organizations there are people in place who had a hard time learning office, who would have a hard time relearning for OO.o and who you simply cannot replace for an assortment of reasons, some political, some logistic(al?) Not everything these people do is done on the computer; even when every visible portion of their work IS digital, a significant amount of processing is done in their brain, and not by the PC. If this weren't true, we'd just replace all the people with computers, and they'd do what we tell them. (Which of course is the problem with computers.)

--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Re:Something dangerous to say on /. by GooTi · 2004-01-11 11:15 · Score: 2, Informative

Yes, it *can* be run on that. I personally used a p-200/80RAM until a while ago, and everything can indeed be loaded. The problem is, I had to wait almost 3 minutes until OOo could say hello. And with Xft enabled the pain is greater.

On the same machine, M$ crap (win98+office97) did just fine. I'm talking about loading time and user input response time. Windoze menus seems to be kicked out of the screen when clicked, compared to gnome or kde equivalents. ICEwm and others are snappier, yes, but usually they're not what you setup for end-end-end-users.