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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."
Hate to say I told you so!
Yes, it IS hard being right all the time.
To do: short sell SCO...
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Other governments will see this as an opportunity to step up efforts against Microsoft. What were Israel's specific complaints against MS? Most government customers seem to be comfortable with their relationship as is...
Whatever happens, it's good to see that at least someone is standing fast against the Microsoft juggernaut. This is looking to be very good for the OSS movement. Not likely to be catastrophic to Microsoft, but at least it might knock them down a peg...please?
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Microsoft, you need to make cheaper software. You also need to sell it in a way customer wants it sold, not in a way that generates maximum earnings, while screwing everybody, left and right.
Monopoly doesn't work anymore. There are alternatives and they work well.
It's good to see Israel encouraging competition (from the Yahoo Article:
"Seeking to cut costs, the Finance Ministry recently said it would not purchase new software from Microsoft this year.
It also said it would encourage the development of lower-priced alternatives. To that end, it is cooperating with Sun Microsystems (NasdaqNM:SUNW - News) and IBM (NYSE:IBM - News) to design a Hebrew language version of OpenOffice software, a freely distributed open-source alternative to Office."
After all of the anticompetitive and unethical behavior that we've seen out of Microsoft, I think that they deserve this. Especially after their I'm glad that Israel is standing firm on this. Netscape may be dead, but perhaps we've learned some lessons on how to effectively deal with an unethical monopoly.
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All CIOs know it... don't buy 'till the last week of the quarter, suddenly discover an alternative solution at the last minute, wheel out competitor's products, competitor's salesguys, consultants and competitor. Beat that software vendor to death.
Must be hard being a Microsoft enterprise rep or sales consultant these days. I am sure they are thoroughly sick of hearing the words 'Linux', and 'Open Source' at every sales meeting they attend.
Not that I feel terribly sorry for them mind you...
Maybe Israel would be more inclined to purchase MS again if MS would just fix the problem, hmmm?
It's not as easy as it sounds. Hebrew is written from right to left and has a different way of writing vowels. It would probably take quite a bit of time to recode the entire thing to support hebrew.
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Of course, in the somewhat longer term, losing that 3-4% of the market will put pressure on the remainder of their sales in Israel. I'm sure that there will be a lot of businesses that will need to communicate with the government electronically. If MS Word and similar file formats can no longer be assumed to be correctly readable by government employees, then businesses will start shifting to software that produces files/attachments that they know can be read properly.
...don't start hypocritically whining about "dumping" or "lowballing" when Office is sold for cheap.
I'm going to say what a lot of other people won't say because they blindly hate Microsoft a little too much. (This is not an insult, please don't lump me in with a stereotype)
/.), the market would shift, slowly, but surely. Microsoft's 'monopoly' isn't about using it's power to force little guys out of the market, it's using its resources to make a better and cheaper product, which then runs the little guys out of the market. To some people Open Office has a great performance/cost ratio that overrides some features in MS Office. So be it. I personally like Office XP (but not 2003). Everybody has their preference and their willingness for compromise between performance and price. The most important part of things like Open Office is that it's inspiring competition, which means MS will produce a better product in the future. And that's something all consumers benefit from.
Microsoft makes a good product. We all deride their security holes, but why do we know about them? (Linux, OS X, and BSD varients have holes too) Hackers target the OSes that the vast majority of computers use. (Why attack 4%, 8%, or 12% when you can attack the 76%?) Their OSes are relatively simple to use and cheap (remember things like OS/2?). If someone else could design a better product for the majority of users (not just powerusers, like many that read
As much as I think its about time someone should stick it to MS and they should be using OSS, I am wondering, how would this effect the Israeli Economy of the Gov't essentially takes $120million out of it in favour of open source. Since MS has an Israeli branch, the money they would spend would stay within the country.
I guess considering the current government is relatively fiscally socialist (yes, the Likud gov't is more to the left than most people think) they could probably find better use for the money such as education, health care or other emergency medical services that are unfortunately needed due to the recent situation.
Does it matter? Well, if it does, I'd guess most of us are "Israel-neutral".
It's not as easy as it sounds.
It's probably a lot easier than it sounds, or at least easier than Microsoft would admit.
Apple has historically provided OS-level support for Hebrew and other non-Roman languages. I can imagine that a word processor like Word might do its own text input and rendering for the document view, but the rest of Word and indeed the rest of Office should be able to take advantage easily of the support that Apple offers. This was certainly true for MacOS 8 and 9, and this page and my own experience lead me to believe that OS X's support for other languages is even better than it was in those older systems.
I suspect that MS is simply dragging its feet on implementing Hebrew in Office for Macintosh because a) it's more work for them and b) the alternative is Windows.
Windows is easy to use, that's true. But other people have made easier to use products before - OS X of course in recent memory, and in the past there have been others..
Office is OK (I even have Office X for the Mac which I prefer to the PC versions), but frankly although each part of office has a lot of features, I would not call any of them great. For straight-up word processing, I much prefer the version of Wordperfect I used to use in college to Word, any version. And for DTP (where you are trying to position elements exactly) Word is pretty much useless.
That's the problem lots of people have with Microsoft - Almost all of Microsoft products are simply OK. There are none that I think of that are so nice to use I find them pleasant. There are plenty of non-Microsoft products that I find very pleasant indeed - like Photoshop. And let's talk about Photoshop for a moment - somehow that remains a huge success despite most major graphical file formats (like TIF or JPG) being totally open specs. Word relies heavily on dominance exactly because no-one can exactly get reading/writing Word files correct.
In other words, Microsoft usually leads based on a strategy of ignorance, whereas other companies (like Adobe) manage to lead through competence.
In that respect I would disagree with your comment about Microsoft simply producing better and cheaper products being the reason they pull ahead. To some extent this is true, but the missing factor that makes it work is that they use any means possible to make sure everyone is using their stuff and not anyone else's, then by keeping data-interchange fixed to work best in Microsoft products they gain a huge leverage that is almost impossible to overcome. Almost impossible - luckily for everyone the slow adoption rate of various versions of Office has meant there has been time to decode the file format and make other word-processing and office suite options a reality.
The way for Microsoft to compete would be to give away copies of the latest version of Office for free, essentially hitting the resent button on the market and making everyone have to play file-format catchup again. But even that might not work well as there are still so many people on older versions of the OS that Office does not support, they might not gain traction even if free.
If Microsoft truly had a product based on quality and price, then Open Office would be no threat. As it is you have an army of users literally chomping at the bit for some other option. How good of a userbase can that be?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not just other goverments, but probably big corporate users as well. Let's face it, Israel is a drop in the bucket in terms of revenue to M$. But if big business decided to follow Israel's lead, M$ could find themselves in a full-scale user revolt. It's not like M$'s licensing, pricing policies and marginal quality hasn't ruffled a few feathers along the way.
Even worse for M$ is that it would be a high-profile win and an effective endorsement for OSS which could tip the balance for potential OSS users sitting on the fence waiting to see if OSS really does provide a viable alternative to M$.
When all else fails, run.
That's only insightful if Israel actually ends up buying MS Office. Otherwise the original point (this is just a tactic for Israel to get a price break) is wrong, even if the action (Microsoft offering a lowered price) is the same as your model.
Basically, I think you jumped the gun a bit to early on proclaiming your prognosticative powers. The time to be smug is when something you predict actually comes to pass.
Since there are factors at work besides price, i would say Israel is serious and will just keep telling Microsoft to go away.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A market of over a billion versus one of, what, six million?
Which one would you write for?
(btw, I'm not sure the elaborate glyphs are what make Chinese more complicated, but rather the vertical orientation. Right-to-left is basically the same code as left-to-right text, only factored for bi-directionality. But vertical text? Thar be dragons there!)
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
When the market of over a billion pirates my software instead of buying it, I go for the six million that might actually pay.
Hell will freeze over before any politician will grow balls enough to cut funding to Israel.
War is necrophilia.
Thats the Irony about Software for BIG clients. These very large amounts could write a lot of software the governments could own or give away. True, there would be false starts, corruption, mistakes etc... but its still a LOT of money.
I think this is ultimately the pay off of a moral stance on software. Governments have a resposibility to literacy, computers are the new literacy. Just like governments give out books they should give out software whenever possible.
The GPL makes it very likely that what gets developed is distributed with little expensive management or strategy. The patronage of the government(s) basically create a marketing free zone. I think this translates into a lot of money available for coding. All it takes is a couple of successful projects a year and Open source could walk through the markets reflecting the government will with democratic software.
120 million thats a lot of money to develope a system that writes memos, even with Hebrew Characters, -- especially when the project rests on the available work of others and is designed to contribute to future projects.
ls
And just like in Munich's case, Microsoft did a counter-proposal that was much cheaper than its normal offering (in the case of Munich, the MSFT proposal ended up being cheaper than the SuSE/IBM/Linux proposal)!
And just like Munich, Israel still kept sticking with Linux, despite Microsoft's concession on the price!
Do we see a pattern here? Hint: it's not because of the price. It's because of whatever else Microsoft stands for (vendor lock-in, lack of security, lack of reliability, proprietary interfaces, disregard for consumer and competition, ...)
They sell to a saturated market and need to grow earnings to maintain their stock-price.
Because Microsoft no longer gets new customers, actually they are starting to lose customers, the only way to raise earnings is to squeeze out more of existing customers locked in.
Their new licensing programme is doing exactly that and is just the start.
The irony is that only the Microsoft-loyal customers are getting ripped off, while customers who haven't bought into MS-technologies (and run servers on Unix) like for example Munich get huge offers for discounts.
However with rising licensing costs, the incentive to move away also rises, so I don't think Microsoft can play that game much longer. Very soon their earnings will begin to fall. Either because they lose just too many customers or because they will have no other choice other than to lower prices.
Not really, the only part of the Bible that I can think of that speaks specifically of this is the Moses story (assuming we are refering to what a Jewish person would mean by the Bible). I personally believe that was more of a zionistic culturally defining tale than anything else.
When some regions like Munich and Israel adopt a different standard, their big sales argument starts to tumble.
Software vendors better jump off .NET because maybe the next generation of customers might want to use non-MS systems or existing customers are located in non-MS regions. Better play it save and use Java or Qt.
Customers will see big examples of how Linux is a real alternative and is used big time in the real world. That alone (that it can be done) will cost Microsoft billions.
The constant efforts by MS to be as incompatible as possible will no longer help them and start to hurt them.
In the name of your citizens,
:))
In the name of your mankind,
THANK YOU, Israel, for choosing not to deal with Microsoft. THANK YOU, 'cause you opened your eyes.
Keep up, men, thousands of people are with you that way!
(PS: To all free software developpers: THANK YOU SO MUCH TOO
The exact share of Microsoft revenues that comes from the Israeli government does not matter *that* much. There is a more important thing at stake: which software will use Israeli citizens, business and other bodies that need to cooperate with their government. For instance, Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics and The Bank of Israel distribute information using Microsoft Excel, many other governmental institutions provide documents and forms in Microsoft Word format -- often Microsoft proprietary formats is the only option available. The same goes for local banks tuning their Web sites specifically for Microsoft Internet Explorer, forgetting about other browsers/platforms. It seems like everyone in this country expects people to own Microsoft software, as a matter of course. For this very reason piracy is outrageous here: Office suite costs about 1/3 of average monthly salary and people simply must have it, no matter legally or not. If the government finds an alternative to Microsoft Office, many users will not need it anymore.
Does anyone know how much the US government spends on Microsoft software every year?
I've been curious about this for quite some time now, but have been unable to find a budget analysis broken down by vendor.
Read, L
However difficult it is doesn't change the fact that even TextEdit (the Notepad of OS X) supports Hebrew. The tools for implementing Hebrew support are built into OS X. All MS has to do is use them.
The potato it is uninformed.
Someone posted this earlier. Here it is Microsoft, here is your fucking TCO comparison chart.
OpenOffice.org: $0
Some things in life money cant buy, for everything else there's:
Outlook 2003:....$109.99
Word 2003:.......$229.99
Excel 2003:......$229.99
PowerPoint 2003:.$229.99
Access 2003:.....$229.99
Publisher 2003:..$169.99
Frontpage 2003:..$199.99
Project 2003:....$599.99
Total: $1999.92
How did this become an israel pro and against debate?
This about a strategic move one of the governments of the world took.
BTW, they financed the localization of open office, and still got it cheaper the ms office.
It's about money, not religion or political views.
Please stick to the point.
The israeli arab conflict is an important issue, but it doesn't really concern microsoft...
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