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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.
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.
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.
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