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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...
I always wondered what would happen when a government able to fall back on religion in an argument and Microsoft lawyer doublespeak would clash in an epic battle of obstinance.
~Tirinal
First they hit their first flat quarter, and then Israel tells them to fuck off. Next thing you know, some fat pervert in a butterfly suit will be without a job.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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?
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
...this is probably standard practice for large Microsoft contracts.
On the box they used to be shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces, it can't be hard to separate them.
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.
My blog
This was another of Israel's recent problems with microsoft. MS wouldn't implement it even when they offered to pay.
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...
...explain how the purported 3-4% revenue from Microsoft Israel might actually impact their (respective) bottom lines? I understand that revenue does not directly translate into profit/loss, correct me if I'm wrong. What about PR in the US? Thanks in advance.
C|N>K
What is the GeoPolitical impact of Isreal undermining the financial base of America's Intellect-Industry.?
Will Isreal's portion of foreign-aid increase or decrease?
Please, talk amounghst yourselves.
Maybe Israel would be more inclined to purchase MS again if MS would just fix the problem, hmmm?
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.
.. .. ..
Microsoft: *funds suicide bombers*
Isreal: "We have NO idea how Mr. Gates and Mr Balmer ended up dead. Next question."
they just got CD-R burners over there! Welcome to piracy, Israel!
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?
Microsoft: *funds suicide bombers*
Israel: *nukes Redmond*
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
...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 $120million out of it in favour of open source. Since MS has an Israeli branch, the money they would spend would stay within the country.
I guess considering the current government is relatively fiscally socialist (yes, the Likud gov't is more to the left than most people think) they could probably find better use for the money such as education, health care or other emergency medical services that are unfortunately needed due to the recent situation.
You're quite likely kidding, but it's actually an interesting question.
:) )
We've seen cases before where American aid to Israel was structured in such a way as to encourage it to purchase stuff from America companies rather than do things itself; one example of this was the Galil -- Israel designed and manufactured a pretty damn fine assault rifle, but then found that the money coming from the US was structured such that it was much, much cheaper to just buy M16s.
Now, mind you, that's probably influenced by the huge brib^H^H^H^Hcontributions defense companies give the government, and I don't think M$ 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
Does it matter? Well, if it does, I'd guess most of us are "Israel-neutral".
Ok, so i misread "least" as "last". My only excuse is that I've been at work for 12 hours. ;P
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.
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
http://news.dmusic.com/article/9813
My fav units are dead Mavs
Microsoft: *funds SCO lawyers*
(using intermediaries just like you know who
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
There is something wrong with this number. In any western world government expenditure is between 20%-30% of GDP and MS sales as a percent would mirror that. Israel is no exception, probably on the high side because of their elevated security expenses.
If the number is correct it must exclude the Military and the health sector. What are thhos sectors using? This is a smoke screen of sorts somthing else is going on behind the scene.
Help fight continental drift.
We all know Office is not a monopoly because its insanely great.
Sure some people might think that, but wether or not it is great (its not,) people don't buy the "best".
They also don't have the "best" marketing. They have a monopoly, years of illegal leverage, and closed data formats--very anti-internet age.
I remember the pre-monopoly days.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
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.
Yes, no matter how much the Arab world wishs/teaches/funds the idea that Isreal should be wiped from the face of the planet.
All Isreal wish to do is protect it's people, why is that so hard for some people to understand?
If you had to pay for it, yes that would probably be the mode of operandi, however since it is free it will reside on all machines. Why would you go to another machine, if you could just use your own.
Help fight continental drift.
George Bush sends an email:
- attachments. html
Attached is a MS Word document stating the new proposed roadmap for peace
Ariel Sharon Replies:
NO WORD DOCUMENTS!
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word
Microsoft will retalliate by re-inserting swastikas back into their Bookshelf Symbol 7 font
its easy to forget about 'human rights' when humans tend to blow themselves up.
c:> dir D OC
Friends_with_Israel.DOC
Deal_with_Devil.DOC
Dinner_with_Saddam.DOC
Kiss_Dubya_ass_less_tax.
c:> delete FRIENDS_WITH_ISRAEL.DOC
I wonder if this has anything to do with the swastikas that accidentally made their way into an MS Office font?
You know what happens if Israel doesn't have weapons? The various Muslim nations next door kill all the Israelis.
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
It's 3-4% of the total money that Microsoft's Israeli branch ("MS Israel") takes in, not 3-4% of what the gov't of Israel spends.
:)
> If the number is correct it must exclude the Military and the health sector.
I don't think MS Israel has a Military or health sector.
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.
Desperate situations provoke desparate acts. If the country you were born in treated you as a 100th class citizen (more like a non-human, an animal) - and bulldozed your home and those of your family and friends - you'd set them up the bomb as well.
Yeah, convert it to NTFS and use the Linux software that uses XP's ntfs.sys driver to access NTFS partitions. Next stupid offtopic question that could be covered by reading slashdot more often, please.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is an army, but they are not physically contiguous or even in communication. So, a poor army indeed for any kind of real fight!
If everyone on earth lived only one mile away from Microsoft (say, in very tall towers) and had balconies overlooking Redmond then the army might be quite a bit more concrete and less figurative.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Personally, I like Windows XP Professional more than other OSes (such as Linux) because it's so much less work, and there's so much software (*cough* games *cough*) for Windows based systems. I will (and do) use Linux when it comes to things like servers, but for day to day operations, I prefer Windows, ever since DOS 6.1 and Windows 3.11 (though I almost murdered my computer when 95 came out, 98 vindicated MS though IMO). My ultimate point is, compared to those other OSes, Windows is aimed at the 'standard' home computer user. The people that don't really understand much about computers, and just want the confounded thing to work. Windows XP is a wonderful OS for people like that. Plug in a printer, and it works...a digital camera, and the pictures transfer easily, a USB key and it instantly installs the driver and the key appears in My Computer...it's that kind of stuff that makes this a good operating system. Sure, the security in it isn't the best in the business, and the interface could use some work (XP cripples the interface intentionally to protect the computer from the user, I don't like it, but I can see how the general public does), but in the end it's a decent line of OSes, and I haven't minded using it for the past decade or so. (except for trying to install a modem in a DOS system in about '93, that memory still haunts me)
Actually, I like MS Office. Even 'back in the day' when there were a lot more alternatives, I still liked Office. Lotus 1-2-3 for the Mac was nice, the first PC spreadsheet programs were quaint, but when MS finally got Excel "finished", I was hooked. The key was that it was easier to install/configure/use (Wordperfect came near to grabbing me a couple of times for a word processor, but ultimately lost out). Now, I've tried Open Office, but I just don't like it. I don't really want to get into the nitty-gritty details about it; the MS one is just more intuitive for me (like a QWERTY keyboard over another one, I guess, it's hard to change, even though they can both be effective). And since I get most of my computers through OEMs (Dell), the MS Office's price is not a big turnoff for me. Now, I can see how a government might not like it, having to license thousands upon thousands of copies to upgrade, but I only have a couple, and I'm perfectly content with Office XP (and will be for at least the next couple years). And I would find it easy to believe that the majority of regular computer users agree with me (conjecture, don't attack me on that last sentence pls).
I also appreciate the air of calm discussion around this and not the 'M$ S|_|XX0RS' '|\|0, MS R0XX0RS!!' that it could have devolved into.
Cost of putting MS Office on 1000 boxes - $400,000.00. I'm sorry but no one taught me to use MS Office, and no one taught me to use OpenOffice. It's not that hard. In fact, pretty much everything is the same with a few changes to option placement. Lost sales? Because they changed their office software? Umm, ok. Maybe a small loss in productivity for a short period, but nothing on the scale of hundreds of thousands of dollars like you seem to imply.
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...
The problem with Israel and the Palestinians is that there are two very sad stories: the inhuman treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis, and the inhuman treatment of the Israelis by the Palestinians. Anyone who ignores the suffering of one of these sides deserves contempt. That goes for fanatics on both sides, and for anyone shouting cheap slogans in favor of one side.
Wide-eyed idealism? Perhaps, but this mess will only ever get solved when enough people on both sides have the courage to protest against the inhumanities of their own side.
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.
This article says that MS offered what Israel originally wanted. It does not say that Israel has now accepted.
This is simply a statement from MS. It is possible that Israel will now do something different.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
Funny, I work in an IT department and the only people allowed to call Microsoft are the techs who administer our large scale server deployments that run windows.
The rest of us don't have anything.
And "IBM IRC, do you have an existing ticket?"
I'm sorry, but you're an idiot.
I live in a giant bucket.
What you posted is irrelevant nonsense.
vi, awk, pico etc. are not used for creating reports and spreadsheets (Just like notepad isn't used for spreadsheets in Windows). Trying to imply that they are makes you just a poor little MS-troll scared seeing his beloved company erode.
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
There are word processors that handle Hebrew on Mac OS X very well, Mellel (http://www.redlers.com/) for example, so it's clearly possible to do. Apple ships OS X with Hebrew support, including several Hebrew fonts (in the Additional Fonts installation option).
I've always believed that MS not supporting Hebrew on the Mac was always intended to insure that people don't switch from Windows. They didn't have any agreements like those signed in the US that forced them to support the Mac.
They probably meant hundredths.
Please explain why CodeRed, CodeRed2 and Nimda (and others) targetted IIS which runs only 20% (and shrinking) share of the market and not Apache which runs 70% (and rising)?
It's more like that:
It doesn't matter wether Microsoft's product runs 12% (like MS SQL), 20% (like IIS) or 95% (like Windows), it's always Microsoft's products that get mass-infected.
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
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
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.
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.
Why MS keeps not one but two R&D centres in Israel? What are they doing there? Developing optical mice?
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?
It's probably safe to assume you are just a bit more tech saavy than your average office worker. Changes that seem minor or trivial to the majority of people that read slashdot are things that would very likely throw your average user for a loop.
- b
Shouldn't Israel have its own locally developed brand of Hebrew softwares?
I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were put out of business by Microsoft long ago.
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
My moneys on MOSSAD. :)
Bill had better watch his back.
siggy played guitar
Hieroglyphs have been available in various forms for years, Winglyph (for Windows) for instance, and is indeed used by egyptologists. Nothing new there, no pushing the envelope.
m l
See e.g.
http://www.hieroglyphs.net/000501/html/000-048.ht
http://www.aegyptisch.de/mdc.html
(A Google search turns up more links.)
I have a life. I really do. I've just chosen to ignore it.
One thing that might happen here is that microsoft might get all pissed off and go to the us government and tell them to cut ties with israel and shit.
I wouldnt be surprised at all.
maybe that's a bit extreme, but stranger has happened.
but good move for israel, %3-%4 doesnt sound like a lot, but it is, in fact, it makes quite a good dent. and once other people see that they dont need to pay for software, microsoft will have red, black and blue asses from all the asskicking they recieve from being boted out of other countries.
Yeah, nice circle there. How do you plan to break it?
You have to start somewhere, not breaking UN resolution would be one place.
one state !!!
One state? So... no Jewish state in what is the area now known as Israel. So that makes it:
Jewish States: 0
Arab (Fully Religious Muslim) States: 27
From the article:
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.
I want a two hundred percent reduction in price too!
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
So to sum it up:
1. $120 million = revenue from just one piece of MS's Israel operations.
2. $3~4 billion = total MS sales/licensing in Israel
3. 3~4% of the Israeli GDP = MS's revenue (money earned w/o accounting for MS expenses)
4. Profit
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Who modded the parent flamebait?
Don't you know anything? Anything pro-Israel is flamebait on slashdot!
Since when is presenting actual facts, even as noted by the UN and all other governments, considred flamebait?
Again, you don't seem to know the Slashdot way. You can only side with the UN when saying things like "Hey Nasi Bush! Get out of Iraq and let the UN run things!" And you only listen to the UN when it serves anti-American or Anti-Israel purposes, like "The UN doesn't recognize this war, so the US sucks!"
Side note: both of those comments would earn you +5, funny or +5, insightful mods...
But... when it's pro-Israel or US, you ignore it, and say things like "Just because the UN voted to create a state of Israel, and 7 Arab nations defied that vote and invaded them and lost, that still gives the Jews no right to that land! They stole that land!"
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.
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.
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.'"
there are allot of christian, non-muslim states why dont they give away some piece of land and make that a jewish state?
Because the Jews never had a country in ancient Italy or Spain, that's why. And, fyi, the Palestinians were given their own land by the UN (something the Arabs never did for their "brothers"), but they decided to try and steal it all, and lost (and then lost again... and again... and 1 more time after that. Then they suddenly decided to whine to the world how THEIR land was "stolen")...
A week's salary. Let's lowball that salary to $25k per year,
Lowball? Wow, I would love to make 25,000 a year... I think need to move out of Maine.
mAineAc
Israel is the size of New Jersey (read: 'slightly larger than a Volkswagon Bug'). This means that comparatively the gov't cannot be that large.
This has to be a saving face issue for MS vs. a revenue loss issue. IBM's (reported) internal drive to get MS off their desktops is probably more of a financial impact with 300k+ employees.
I imagine we'll see a hefty donation to Israel from Bill Gates shortly for some humanitarian cause. Funny thing is that Israel will probably accept it then go about pursuing Open Source regardless.
In the US, it's only the Republicans who are unquestioningly pro-Israel. Almost all Democrats are pro-Palestinian, more than half are anti-Israel, and a couple (Al Sharpton comes to mind) are anti-Semetic.
If the Republicans don't manage to fix the 2004 elections, there may not BE an Israel for Microsoft to get shafted by for much longer. And once Israel is out of the way, the Muslim extremists will come after the US in much greater force.
It's heavy, it rusts, and its accuracy is pathetic because the sights jiggle all over the place.
I carried it for 3 years and it is a dog. Gimme an M-16 any day.
because Microsoft is an American company and every product sold by them directly benefits the US economy.
By your reasoning, if congress was spending $.60 of every $1.00 at Joe's Adult Fun Emporium, it would be perfectly OK, as "Joe's" is an American company, and every dollar spent there goes back into the American economy.
While I do agree that it is better for our govt to spend money on products and services from American suppliers rather than sending that money overseas to foriegn companies, I still believe that it is reasonable too as how and where our tax dollars are being spent.
Read, L
Bulshit.
Sharpton may be an exception but not one of the democratic candidates have said anything bad about Israel. They are all fighting for the same pool of jewish votes. Not even Hillary (your most hated woman) has critized Israel.
The republican discovered their love is Israel last election cycle. Before that they were all about cutting off foreign aid.
BTW how would the muslimg destroy a country with over 200 nuclear weapons?
War is necrophilia.
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
You may not have meant it this way, but this sentence makes it sound as though the arrangement is somehow disguised.
It's not hidden or obscure at all. Here's how it works: If the Israeli Ministry of Defense buys equipment that is at least 50% US-made, then they get to spend the US military aid money on it. If the equipment is 49% or less US-made, they have to pay for it themselves. The specific rules that define what percentage of a given product is from the US are very complex, of course -- it's a very complex question -- but it's all very open.
"Structured to encourage" sounds rather shady, even if it ultimately means the same thing as "You can only spend our money if you spend it with us".
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Oh right - I forgot "offtopic." :rolleyes:
Care to explain the continued U.S. funding of one of the sides of this holocaust?
Hey! Maybe if you let them all simmer in their own juices for a while, Ahab the Arab wouldn't want to cast Jihad against the USA.
Just a thought.
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: $1999.92
How did this become an israel pro and against debate?
This about a strategic move one of the governments of the world took.
BTW, they financed the localization of open office, and still got it cheaper the ms office.
It's about money, not religion or political views.
Please stick to the point.
The israeli arab conflict is an important issue, but it doesn't really concern microsoft...
I love burekas in the morning
OpenOffice and Microsoft (hell, the whole "GUI Paradigm" ) all function with the same basic concepts. For most kind of work ( basic spreadsheets / memo's) retraining consists of saying, "The menu's are a little different, but everything's in there, have a bit of a look, knock yourself out."
Which is much the same situation with respect to moving to MS Office 2003.
IIRC MS Office 97 is the most commonly used. Because for many users it is "feature complete".
How many Israelies are not jewish?
How many jews in the american finance (i.e. all the banks) and business sector?
How long before someone will begin to pull the strings attached to the Israeli government?
How long will the "rebellion" be ignored?
This is neither anti nor pro-anything, including religions or countries... merely a question towards the obvious.
Best regards,
Steen Suder
-- for email: send to
but MS Word sometimes has problems opening its documents... nice effort, but I'll stick with my M$, thanks
Hmmm...you know, I bet these people don't actually pay to use M$. I can't think of very many people I know who would keep using Office if they had to pay for it. As long as they can "borrow" somebody's cd, yes, they will continue to use Office. If, however, they were offered the choice of $450 or free + a few glitches, I am willing to bet they would go for the latter.
The Jews get so much attention because they are much more than 2% of the population of states like CA and NY, and they vote in much greater proportion than the population at large. The voting population of a place like Manhattan is probably closer to 15% Jewish, and 15% of a voting population is worthy of attention.
Israel gets so much attention because the religious Christians know what will happen to their holy sites if the Palestinians control it, and the Christian right has a stranglehold on the US government.
You have your order backwards - the reason these people are treated that way is because they are engaging in murdering civilians.
"An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind" --Ghandi
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
Because they are organized, vote monolithicly, give contributions to politicians.
Same with unions, doctors, lawyers etc. If you can organize yourself, get people out to vote and give campaign contributions then you get attention.
War is necrophilia.
I do believe that every governments in the world are putting themselves at great risks by choose MS Office for 1 reason: MSOffice format (.doc, .xls) is NOT A STANDARD!!
What's the big deal?
Well, in a few year you could end up with a ton of official documents locked in a format you won't be able to read without MS product! That's a big risk for a government.
Yes, as of today, a lot of companies (including OpenOffice) breaked the MS format in a decent (but not perfect) way. But what in a couple of years from now? They may well complicate their format a lot.
That's a big reason why government NEED to switch to something like StarOffice or OpenOffice because the file format is PUBLISHED, AVAILABLE FOR ALL. So they won't be locked in with MS products!
Montreal - Best city to live in!
To follow up on this, I think it's relevant to point out that sticking with Microsoft will not save you from having to re-train your office administration staff.
For example, the Mail Merge function (a very popular function with office staff) changed completely between MS Office 2000 and MS Office XP. Our IS department spent a lot of time helping various offices try to make the same merges work in the new system. Likewise, some people find the UI differences between Windows 2000 and Windows XP to be incredibly frustrating.
If users can accomodate the changes caused by product upgrades from Microsoft, it's not unreasonable for them to accomodate a change to a non-Microsoft system.
Israel is giving away afree OS to anyone - it is a copycat of Windows
beep beep.
no passing the buss when the stop sign is out.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Adam, please watch what you say. Let's not turn this into a partisan issue.
First of all, you have to make a big distinction between Democrat politicians and rank-and-file Democrats as of late. As far as Congress goes, being pro-Israel is a bipartisan stance, and we need to keep it that way. Both Republican and Democrat Congressmen have long records of being pro-Israel. If you go around accusing Democrats of being anti-Israel, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The trend in the American left today is to take the opposite stance of your political opponents, even if it disagrees with your principles! That's why you see Democrats bashing Bush for being an extreme conservative even though he has given them a completely liberal domestic agenda. They feel like they have to bash whatever Bush does simply because he's a Republican. If Republicans support Israel and accuse Democrats of not supporting Israel, it may produce a polarization over time and Democrats may start opposing it because it's a "Republican issue."
We need to speak carefully. This is an issue Republicans and Democrats honestly agree on. There should be no division on supporting Israel. Let's acknowledge and affirm each other's efforts. For example, Congress has declared at least twice that Israel's capital should be Jerusalem instead of Tel Aviv. And an undivided Jerusalem to boot, which includes eastern Jerusalem - part of the PA-occupied "West Bank." The sentiment is supported overwhelmingly by both parties. Yet, among Israeli politicians today, the idea of officially annexing eastern Jerusalem and making the whole city the capital is considered to be so hard-line right-wing, or just diplomatically infeasible, that's it's almost never discussed. Conservative Israelis lament that our Congress is more Zionist than their Knesset.
Howard Dean, Al Sharpton, and their supporters are indeed anti-Israel or even pro-P.A., but current Democrat office holders, with few exceptions, support Israel pretty solidly. We should not provoke them into taking the opposite side to oppose us.