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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."
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...
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
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...
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.
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".
MS will produce a better product in the future.
a little optimistic, aren't we? You make a good point. If Microsoft's products were absolutely horrible from a personal user viewpoint, then nobody would buy them. But you can't very well argue about cost effectiveness against a free product that is as basic as an office program.
Let's face it, word processors and spreadsheets aren't exactly like GUIs and 3D graphics utilities. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there have been very few major improvements in word processing technology since they started making the page background white and the text black. "Word art" doesn't count, and especially not that annoying little paper clip thing (I want to bend him into an inappropriate shape).
Think about it this way: they either pay 3-4% of MS's annual revenue... or they can pay nothing. Now, even if I had to type with my feet because the program only supported special foot-keyboards, I would STILL choose the free program. Maybe that was a bad analogy, but you get the point.
Esoteric reference.
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.
The rest of your argument is reasonable, but this part is really not. There are many examples of MS "using it's power to force little guys out of the market". And not just little guys, but big ones (until MS had wiped them out, anyway). With bundling and OEM deals the competition is locked out. Eg Netscape, alternative all office suites (WordPerfect, Lotus, etc).
Indeed, and it goes like this:
MS: So, we're going to sell you our lock-in software at inflated prices because you obviously have no other alternative; then be prepared for a mandatory accelerating upgrade cycle combined with price hikes.
Customer: So.... we were thinking maybe of using open-source softw-
MS: We can do software individually wrapped with gold foil and a complementary kiss on the ass.
Customer: SOLD!
(Why attack 4%, 8%, or 12% when you can attack the 76%?)
Funny that a lot of the grief we have had from MS attacks were because of IIS and SQL server... Both of which have significantly less market share than Apache and Oracle for example...
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
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
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.
Microsoft will retalliate by re-inserting swastikas back into their Bookshelf Symbol 7 font
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
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.
Government expenditures as a share of GDP in the First World, by geographic/cultural zone:
Former British Empire:
Australia: 36.0%
Canada: 40.6%
Ireland: 34.4%
New Zealand: 36.5%
United Kingdom: 40.9%
United States: 35.6%
Average: 37.3%
Germanic Europe:
Austria: 51.9%
Belgium: 50.2%
Germany: 48.6%
Luxembourg: 46.1%
Netherlands: 47.3%
Average: 48.8%
Latin Europe:
France: 54.0%
Italy: 47.7%
Portugal: 46.1%
Spain: 39.8%
Average: 46.9%
Scandanavia:
Denmark: 55.3%
Finland: 49.2%
Iceland: 44.6%
Norway: 46.7%
Sweeden: 58.6%
Average: 50.9%
Other:
Japan: 38.6%
Switzerland: 39.9%
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.'"
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
Yes, it *can* be run on that. I personally used a p-200/80RAM until a while ago, and everything can indeed be loaded. The problem is, I had to wait almost 3 minutes until OOo could say hello. And with Xft enabled the pain is greater.
On the same machine, M$ crap (win98+office97) did just fine. I'm talking about loading time and user input response time. Windoze menus seems to be kicked out of the screen when clicked, compared to gnome or kde equivalents. ICEwm and others are snappier, yes, but usually they're not what you setup for end-end-end-users.