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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."
At last? People have been moving away from MS solutions for years. The "movement" is snowballing, and gaining more momentum as more and more media outlets report "alternative" software solutions like linux, but don't think the Israel govt are pioneering anything here; they're simply the latest in a long line of organisations moving away from MS (my current employer another example of the exodus).
You notice that in these disputes they always say they don't want to buy MS software because MS makes them buy the whole Office Package. Then Microsoft "clarifies" claiming that you could have always bought MS Office programs seperately?
Exactly. Once the StarOffice formats become the de-facto standard for communicating with the government lots of other businesses are going to realize that they too can get away with using StarOffice (or OpenOffice.org). If the Israeli government does switch pretty soon every single business in Israel will find that they have to have at least one machine lying around with OpenOffice.org on it.
Heck, I can fully understand why Israel says no.
You're quite likely kidding, but it's actually an interesting question.
:) )
We've seen cases before where American aid to Israel was structured in such a way as to encourage it to purchase stuff from America companies rather than do things itself; one example of this was the Galil -- Israel designed and manufactured a pretty damn fine assault rifle, but then found that the money coming from the US was structured such that it was much, much cheaper to just buy M16s.
Now, mind you, that's probably influenced by the huge brib^H^H^H^Hcontributions defense companies give the government, and I don't think M$ contributes quite *that* much, but we're not very far away from a situation where, say, the next appropriations bill to support Israel has $X million for software purchases from US firms.
(Oh, and I was born and raised Israeli, have lived in the US since 1985, prefer Unix and am writing this on a WinXP laptop. My loyalties are all over the place
The funny thing about office suites is that it doesn't really matter what you like, what matters is what everyone else uses. For example, I still think that WordPerfect is the best word processor I have ever used. However, you can't email WordPerfect documents to people and expect them to be able to read them, and so I spend a lot of time using MS Word.
That's why deals like the Israeli government are so important. If Sun can win over the Israeli government to StarOffice then within a year or so every single Israeli business is going to have a copy of StarOffice (or OpenOffice.org) installed on one of their computers so that they can use StarOffice formats for correspondence with the government. Everyone ends up having to talk to the government, and you can bet that if the government switches office suites that is going to have a big impact on the rest of the Israeli market.
Microsoft is going to have to switch tactics sooner or later. Right now Microsoft uses the fact that their formats are a de-facto standard to tie businesses to their upgrade treadmill. However, the days when Microsoft can walk into a business and dictate terms are over, and frankly, that's good for everyone. I have never thought that Microsoft was a monopoly, but I am glad to see them get a little competition.
But back then, IIRC, you could buy them as separate components. And now that you can't, the logo is different; it's all connected together as one big set of loops for Office 2003. Hmmm...
Microsoft Windows is, fittingly, the official Desktop OS of Olig
Israel govt's purchases account for 3-4% of MS Israel's annual revenue.
3-4% sounds way low. Here in Australia governments account for 30-40% of MS Revenue.
You make a very *few* good points....
But MS has used very sharp business practices to increase their profits, and screw others - namely customers, and competitors.
But, simply because they might (in the future) make a better product, doesn't mean I'd really consider using them again.
Guido might decide he'd only break your legs instead of killing you. Does that make you think - "Oh, Guido's turned over a new leaf. I think I'll make him a majority shareholder in my company!" ? I think not. MS is a sharp dealing company who uses thuggish tactics to screw over who it wills. That isn't going to change, and simply because they make it cheaper or better isn't going to make me put the scorpion in *my* pocket when I have other options.
The real problem for Microsoft, is that much of the world feels this way, IMHO. This isn't a problem, when MS has all our balls in their iron grip. Most of us aren't willing to risk the pain, and don't have lots of options. But when those options DO appear, the whole world will line up to stick the shiv in MS's soon to be lifeless body.
People may suck up to the bully when they have to. But that doesn't mean they loose their memory when they don't have to anymore.
We'll see when and if Linux gets dominance in the PC market about security holes. But I suspect it will still be miles ahead of MS.
(BTW, you don't want people to stereotype YOU, but you say "lot of other people won't say because they blindly hate Microsoft a little too much."
Pot, meet kettle.
Sheesh.
Cheers,
Greg
Yeh they can split up the office quick as you please if it means sales to another country or big account, but when the DOJ says to break up components all we hear is how it's an integrated platform designed to have office explorer and the oS run together.
> Money is not everything
:)
Then what is it about?
He didn't say money wasn't a factor, he said money wasn't everything. So your question should really be phrased, "what else is it about?" And in this case, one of the things it seems to be about is Hebrew language support. There may be (probably are) other issues as well. (Like trust, like promoting a local software industry, like not getting locked into one-sided long-term contracts, like control of your own destiny, like freedom, etc.)
> Microsoft, you need to make cheaper software
Oh, that definitely clears things up!
Yes, if you chop out the part where he says, "You also need..." and then lists stuff, then maybe you can (pretend to?) completely misunderstand what he had to say. With journalistic skills like that, I bet you could get a job as a slashdot editor.
Israel is in the middle of a severe budget crunch. That's encouraging the government to look for ways to cut costs.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
What a crock of shit. Nobody needs to use vi / pico / sed / awk if they don't want to.
And frankly, if my secretary needed a silly paper clip to figure out how to print something, they'd be fired, because they sure as hell don't meet my definition of a secretary.
OpenOffice and Microsoft (hell, the whole "GUI Paradigm" ) all function with the same basic concepts. For most kind of work ( basic spreadsheets / memo's) retraining consists of saying, "The menu's are a little different, but everything's in there, have a bit of a look, knock yourself out."
For the advanced stuff, it turns out that people who actually do the advanced stuff can normally be retrained fairly easily as well.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
All loyal MS customers who use MS technology (like .NET): Expect to pay more for your licenses.
All MS-critics who use cross-platform technology (like Java, OpenOffice): Expect Microsoft to reward your forward thinking with sweet discounts.
Microsoft Head Office has refused to add Hebrew support to Office v.X. Microsoft Israel had offered to foot the localization costs (probably a stupid move), but Microsoft refused them.
Microsoft, it said, "has recently broken its policy of unified pricing of products worldwide. In Thailand and England there were reductions of hundreds of percent" on products that it sells.
Interesting...did MS really pay the Thai and UK governments to use MS products? After all it is pretty hard to reduce the price of anything more than 100%. Heck if MS wants to pay me to use Office, I'll gladly cash that check.
Now that I think about it, it wouldn't surprise me of MS DID in fact pay the gov'ts to use its products...I'm sure they would receover the costs multiple time over somewhere else.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
In a related thing I read recently in Linux Format #49 (pg 102).
MS offered a $2000 discount on MSOffice software to Schoolnet Nambia
only to make them fork out $9000 for Win XP.
SNNs' director told MS (i'm paraphrasing) to f*** off and is sticking
with open source software.
www.linuxformat.co.uk
siggy played guitar
OpenOffice.org will certainly open and save in MS Office formats. However, once you get OpenOffice.org on all of those government desktops how long do you think it is going to be before Israeli government workers are simply emailing around OpenOffice.org formats? MS Word is absolutely useless for opening OpenOffice.org documents. That will leave MS Office users with two alternatives.
Not to mention the fact that once OpenOffice.org becomes the de facto standard for government use lots of other Israeli companies are going to rethink their office suite strategy. Microsoft still has to sell upgrades, and they already have a hard time competing with older versions of their own product. Throw in competition from a useful Free Software office suite (that just happens to be the government standard), and selling MS Office just got to be a whole lot harder. Especially since folks just buying a "Dell" these days generally end up with Corel's PerfectOffice, and not MS Office.
The fact of the matter is that these sorts of switches generally happen faster than you would think. I still remember when Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect were the de-facto standards, and these products went from dominant to underdog in very little time.
MSOffice is priced too high, Israel understands this. Israel also understands that OpenOffice.org is a lot cheaper and can do much of the same things as MSOffice.
OpenOffice.Org should be ported to many different languages if it is to compete with MSOffice. I see this as a bold move to help bring about an alternative to MSOffice that is more affordable. I wonder if certain Software can be called Kosher? :)
I am reminded of China going with its own version of Linux and trying to develop an alternative to Windows from it. Will more countries get the guts to say "No" to Microsoft and use alternatives or make deals with other companies to create alternatives? I hope so.
This could be the start of a new trend. A movement away from MS products and towards alternatives like OSS products.
One factor not mentioned in the articles is Malware, Windows and MSOffice can easily be inflected by Malware but Linux and OpenOffice.Org are not infected by the same Malware. So there is a hidden cost to the TCO, if the Microsoft software gets infected with Malware. Consider a few hours of downtime to scrub the systems of the Malware infected on it.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I tried using OpenOffice, and ran into constant small problems with opening documents prepared by MS Office tools. The problems with Word were mostly annoying -- the spacing slightly wrong here, a font size different there, etc. The problems with Excel and PowerPoint were much more serious. A noticable fraction of the slides were simply not readable. All of the spreadsheets except the very simplest ones had serious problems.
If I'm a business person preparing a proposal or any other document for the government, and I know that the government official is going to open it with OpenOffice, I'm going to want to prepare it with OpenOffice.
Interesting -- in the context of popular software like OS's or office app's, what you say is a strong argument in favor of OSS over any proprietary solutions. With OSS, if users/customers really want a particular feature, and have the resources, they can just add it in themselves.
If the Israeli govt. was offering a substantial payment to develop the Hebrew code, it stands to reason that they could instead hire enough local talent to handle the extra development, QA, support, etc. that you mention. -- if they had access to the source code. No need for them to be subject to MS's internal cost considerations for the support of the additional language.
Of course, the original code would probably also have to be reasonably clean/organized to make that feasible. So even if MS were to open the source to them, it still might not be an option...
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
OpenOffice.org will certainly open and save in MS Office formats. However, once you get OpenOffice.org on all of those government desktops how long do you think it is going to be before Israeli government workers are simply emailing around OpenOffice.org formats?
Especially given that the OpenOffice.org formats result in smaller files. Combined with the issues of MS Word documents possibly having data you don't want third parties to see.