Israel v. Microsoft, Next Round

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."

Comments

still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac

[Anonymous Coward]

This was another of Israel's recent problems with microsoft. MS wouldn't implement it even when they offered to pay.

Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac

[1u3hr]

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.

Re:still no hebrew support in MS Office for mac

[Derivin]

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:Will they understand now?

[TWX]

"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.

Re:Buying Office Programs as individual components

[Keeper]

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).