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Microsoft Opposing California Open Doc Bill
ZJMX writes "Microsoft is going through its email and phone lists asking people to support their opposition to California A.B. 1668 — 'Open Document Format, Open Source' — by writing to the California Assemblymen involved in this bill (contact info in the link). Apparently they fear that California will join Massachusetts in wanting documents based on open standards in their government. Let's see if this community can raise as much support for the California ODF bill as Microsoft can raise opposition."
This is what I read:
"Blah blah blah politics. Bitch bitch bitch IBM did this so now we do it."
I read this hoping for some key points in distinguishing the functionality or benefits versus costs in using either format.
Nope.
The closest they get to that is "ODF is tightly tied to OOo." Oh, no! Not that! You know, that argument is null and void, right? Because these document formats are supposed to be open, like the names of both of them imply. Who cares if it's not yet integrated into your product, either format should allow that. It is, in fact, confusing to me why they don't let both formats exist and allow the government bodies to pick whatever the hell the want to store their data in. That's all this is, a political issue which is why it's filed in the politics section I guess.
If Microsoft truly believed their product to be superior to the alternative, they would sit back and let California make the mistake. Then, when everything falls apart, they could step in and save the day, while at the same time setting a precident for one format being better than the other. But, we all know that's not going to happen because I haven't heard Massachussetts hurting due to their choice. So, I guess Mr. Ballmer is going to have to set his fears aside & simply come to the harsh realization that another community developed format is just as good or better than their format. Heads up, ODF community, he just may fucking kill you.
And I certainly don't appreciate them demonizing IBM. "Big bad evil corporation launches national campaign to force their consumers into using something!" Pot calling the kettle black, in my opinion. If you could track the amount of money I have paid to a company--directly or indirectly--I would wager that I've paid IBM far less than Microsoft and I feel that IBM has done far more for me than Microsoft.
Shut up and let the consumer decide, Microsoft. Nothing's wrong with unbiased comparisons in helping them decide but you've got a conflict of interest here so I highly doubt anyone will swallow your tripe.
My work here is dung.
The benefits of avoiding vendor lock, true interoperability fostering competition among the software vendors etc will ulitmately benefit the consumers. No doubt about it. Among the consumers the biggest block is the corporate America and these big companies that spend billions of dollars. But they dont seem to care much for OpenDoc and are, persumably willingly, paying whatever MSFT is billing them. What is going on? Bigname PC vendors all compete on price and not single one of them is trying to differentiate themselves from rest of the pack by pre loading the windows boxes with OpenOffice or FireFox or Gimp. Corporate America is not demanding true interoperability and a level playing field for their vendors. Either there is some serious wrong doing by MSFT like bribing IT managers and giving kick backs to PC vendors. Or these people are really dumb. Still I think the time to celebrate is when corporate America decides not lock up their data in a format owned by someone else. Politicians are fickle. A few thousand in campaign contributions they will sing MSFT anthem and betray their voters.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They can't get their foot in the door of the government, so now they resort to spamming?
home
Microsoft seem to have become a very large and well funded political lobbying group.
Sure they buy in lots of software and rebrand it, they also copy a load of stuff and then try to bundle into their existing products. However, have they actually developed anything in the last year or two that did not suck and then disappear?
My little Linux and tech blog
...Microsoft knows that the one and only thing that is preserving their monopoly is Microsoft Office as a standard. If that ever goes away, so does their monopoly. Anyone can run a Mac or Linux and have 75% of their needs happily met via these (or any other) operating system. The one piece missing is fully compatible office software. So, Microsoft needs to hold everyone hostage with proprietary Office formats.
Thanks,
Mike
on the other hand, one might think there shouldn't be any need for the phrase "legacy purposes only" when discussing the first version of a new standard.
Any conversion of such things should reasonably be done in the tool doing the file conversion, not in the file format itself.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
Dear Representative Smith:
One of Microsoft's innovations is our ability to help millions of customers with our proprietary file formats. If large purchasers, such as your state government, wrongly conclude that an open standard is in their best interest, Microsoft's proprietary file format becomes substantially less valuable to all Americans, and indeed, the world.
So let us describe to you what will happen if this proposal becomes reality:
(1) Microsoft will need to compete with other products based on attributes other than file format. In turn, Microsoft products will rise in price by millions of dollars, leading to riots in your neighborhood.
(2) This will forever make the USA a 3rd world country. China will be willing to step in and take over Microsoft's responsibility as the engine of the American economy.
(3) An American innovator and icon will no longer be the richest man in the world. Americans will no longer be proud or patriotic; most, if not all, will end up voting against you. Microsoft will no longer be a name loved by millions of children - instead, it could be "Al Jezerra".
Please make your decision carefully. We have included a check of $50,000 to put towards your next campaign. See you at the golf tournament next week!
Either there is some serious wrong doing by MSFT like bribing IT managers and giving kick backs to PC vendors.
I think that the major PC vendors are in bed with MS for the following reason: it gives them a huge advantage against small VAR PC vendors and/or people who would build their own PC.
My company used to build workstations for our customers; we didn't make a profit on them (it's all about the service) but could price them competitively. At this point, with the prices and availability (or lack thereof) we get from our distributors, we would lose money on each PC sold. It's bad enough that we could buy a PC from Dell, take the components out and put them in our own case and sell it for the same price, but Windows pushes us over the edge. Ingram Micro charges us about $132 for XP Pro or Vista, which is far above the price that they charge Dell.
The same goes for home computer builders I imagine. Once one figures in the cost of a MS OS, there's probably no way that one could build a Windows machine for the same or less money. I'm sure that someone will post a response with links to prices for ten different retailers (probably with rebates), but that's just trading time for money.
When contacting people, please remember what is crucial:
Be polite - this will make them much more likely to listen. If you are feeling angry, take a walk outside, have a nice snack then come back when you are calmed down.
Make personal contact - fax or phone where you can; reinforce emails by calling up to check that they got them. Write your own letter, based on somebody elses template if you need, but with your own information. If they promise to look into it, call back later to find out what they found out.
State clearly your relationship to them - resident of the state / local business / supporter / floating voter etc. Always find a reason why they should take notice of you. Identify yourself clearly and let them call you back later (better to give a business phone or mobile so that they don't call you at home during election campaign time though)
Give information - links to pages about problems - specific links to ODF sites or the Wikipedia article etc. to show alternatives. However, read through those pages yourself and pick out and explain specific points from them that you think are important.
Be efficient. Make your point early; don't drown them in extra information; Say only things which you think are important.
Be original. Give specific information about your position and how you will benefit from alternative solutions. Show that you care about it and why.
Surprise, _yes_, Microsoft lobbies IT managers and even managers from higher levels. And they have done it some much that managers already have used to it and assumes it as "natural" right to have "gifts" from Microsoft. Not to blame only Microsoft entirely, it is common "marketing style" of lot of companies who produces so-so products.
It is corruption? yes. Corruption is still corruption, whatever government or shareholder's company is involved. However, you will have hard time to convince those managers not to accept these presents. Because overall atmosphere and dignity in such jobs are long gone. Only if you inform heavily shareholders you maybe will do something.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Big business leaders don't know IT. For that matter, few people in IT really know IT, but that is another rant.
Someone who can run a transport company successfully and knows that only a fool would allow your company to be totally dependent on one vehicle supllier will NOT realise that the same thing applies to the computers controlling the fleet of vehicles.
Standard example, every truck fleet owner has a favorite brand, yet they always got a couple of trucks that are of a different brand. The reason, simple, it makes negotiations a bit easier. Sure out of the 500 trucks in company 490 will be say Mercedes BUT on the day the Mercedes rep comes to talk about a new order you can bet that the 10 daf trucks will be proudly parked right outside the office. Just a hint that the order does not have to go to Mercedes this time.
That is because trucking company directors understand trucking. They do not understand IT. So when the MS salesrep arrives he will have confirmed via outlook, using documents created in office and be assured of seeing nothing but windows machines as he visits the office.
Offcourse he still gives a nice discount. That is easy. Establish the true price, hike it by a couple of hundred percent, give a discount of 50% percent and you got MS record profits.
And the really odd thing is that all those directors who wouldn't trust a truck maker who reported the same kind of profits as MS think it is a good sign that MS is making such huge profits.
People do NOT understand fields that they are not experts in and this goes triple for IT.
Couple this with the old maxim, nobody has ever been fired for buying Microsoft and you got the current situation.
It is changing but you are going to have to fight a bloody struggle to get anywhere. Remember, if you introduce linux into a company and suddenly costs plummet and productivity soars you will have made an awfull lot of enemies, every single person who said that MS software was the way to go.
I was in this situation once. A company had two websites belonging to different divesions. The one I was responsible for ran a webshop and services for customers and offcourse ran on linux cheapo hardware. The intraweb was purely windows and was run by the internal IT department but it also contained some sites available to our resellers and such. My divesion was brought back in under the umbrella of the mother coorperation, our website sold more products then all other sales efforts combined, so rather then being an experiment we turned into the biggest sales channel.
Anyway, oneday a director asked the question of why the intraweb was down once again, and for some reason the question was asked NOT to the internal IT department but to the web department (probably the doofus didn't realize the difference).
So what was I supposed to do? The reason the intraweb sucked was simple, it was run on windows, with IIS (or ISS, what ever acronym stands for steaming pile of garbage, was run by windows admins, and just wasn't designed by anyone who cared.
Yet for some reason, the idea seemed to be that since the director new that we used linux and windows and that the intraweb sucked that linux was used for the intraweb. And since everyone knows I run Linux I was told to convert the site to windows to fix the troubles and get help from the internal IT department.
Can you guess how many seconds it took me to reactivate my CV on monsterboard?
It was not that the guy in question was an idiot, he knew his business. It just didn't happen to be IT. And what could I do? My department was supposed to merge with the internal IT department and since they wore suits it was pretty clear to me who would end up as whose boss.
So I arranged some job interviews, and just told them that linux sadly wasn't up to the job and that switching the external site to windows was the best way to go, but sadly I did not have the qualifications to do that so the internal IT department should handle it, and handed in
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I have bad karma. What do I care what you think?
Did the email even originate from Microsoft? As far as I can tell, all we have is a single email received by a single person. Perhaps it's a delayed April Fool's joke or something of that sort? It would be incredibly stupid (even for Microsoft) to send out official emails like this.
Even if several people receive such emails, that doesn't prove it is from Microsoft. Is there any official reaction by them, or proof that it came from an official Microsoft email account?
Regardless of this matter, the push for ODF is a great idea.
Who is 'Open Doc Bill' and why does Microsoft oppose his going to California?
;-)
No time to RTFA but lots of time to post and read replies!
Give a man a match: warm him for an instant. Douse him in petrol and set him aflame: warm him for the rest of his life.
Apparently, it happened in Florida also. State Representative Ed Homan added the use of open standards to a bill in state senate. A day later, he was visited by three people from Microsoft. The bill about the open standards was rejected. http://uf.freeculture.org/2007/04/01/legislature-2 007-state-of-florida-it/
This isn't about vendor preference, it's about freedom of public access to public documents.
For the public to allow vendor lock and depend on a single vendor for future access because they accepted a vendor standard is "just plain stupid".
No vendor whould be forced out, but the product the public entities buy would be standardized.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The State of California is a customer and, like you, has to right to choose what it buys based on measurements of price vs. performance. If California says it requires software for its bureaus that uses neutral file formats, then the expression of that requirement is no more legislating people out of business than a requirement that paint bought for state buildings meet minimum performance and environmntal standards. As California, the great state where I reside, is spending taxpayer money, there are occasional efforts towards ensuring that the money isn't being spent in stupid ways. (I shall not be reimbursing any one for keyboards lost while reading the prior sentence.)
Something I'm really curious about: where are the Microsoft shareholders on these questions. Why do they think that when large customers start to evolve different requirements, the proper response is to spend money on publicity, lobbying, and advocacy advertising and to play chicken with the customers, rather than evolving with the market?
Erm, I know we shouldn't feed trolls, but you clearly don't understand a couple of key points here.
Firstly - "chickenfeed" on Windows and MS Office? Are you insane? Have you ever been involved in procurement for the Microsoft tools? I'm guessing not, as then you'd realise just how expensive it is to provide Windows, Office and a few other bits and bobs for a 10,000+ strong userbase. Either that or you're Bill Gates and several million dollars is chickenfeed to you.
Secondly - yes, Excel is a popular platform, but not just amongst managers. It's one of the few tools that most office based employees use on a regular basis, far more so than Word, Access and in quite a lot of cases even more so than the web. I know plenty of users who don't have a clue how to use websites and find them intimidating but are still comfortable with Excel, as they have to do their reporting through it and use it for home accounts etc. As such, while it's not an ideal platform for developers, interoperability and much more, it is pretty damned useful for putting out straightforward productivity tools that don't scare the general public.
--- Band: Joey Ultra
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
A law that dictates that ODF is used for the state's documents does not exclude any vendor from the market. Microsoft is welcome to add ODF support to its office suite, but refuses to do so. In other words, they are excluding themselves from competing by not supporting ODF. Instead of adding support for ODF, they try to push states to standardize on their format instead.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster