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Major Australian ISP Pulls OpenOffice

Posted by kdawson on from the can't-stand-the-competition dept.

thefickler writes "Australia's largest Internet service provider Telstra BigPond has removed OpenOffice from its unmetered file download area following the launch of its own, free, hosted, office application, BigPond Office. The removal of OpenOffice was brought to TECH.BLORGE's attention by a reader, who complained to Telstra BigPond's support department about no longer being able to download OpenOffice updates. The support people were quite open about why OpenOffice was no longer available, i.e. because it was perceived to be competitive with BigPond Office."

4 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. How about forcing their customers too.. by LingNoi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I hate your font, it's so damn small..

    Anyway on with the topic, I have one better then that.

    What if the ISP restricted file transfers of .odt files since after all it would "be competitive with BigPond Office".

  2. Big Pond? by MMC+Monster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I live north of the equator. Exactly how big is this ISP that they can afford to develop their own office suite? And what is the business plan behind this? Especially since it competes on one side with Microsoft Office and on the other with openoffice.org.

    --
    Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
  3. The immature thing to do. by ShagratTheTitleless · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Everyone using that ISP could set up a script to download BigPond Office over and over when their machine is idle. ;) Bah, it would probably violate their T.O.S. and lag out the network for everyone else.

    --
    Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
  4. Re:Bunch of Kangaroos! by dbIII · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What a bunch of kangaroos!

    Their upper levels of management are now exclusively from the USA in the odd half privatised government telco with no government control that is Telstra. The locals are actually refered to as "savages" by some managers. There is a certain type of US manager that goes wild overseas and needs to be chained to a personal lawyer 24/7 to stop them doing stupid and illegal business practices. Some of the latest gems that were implemented is making employees wear voice recorders all day at work (illegal to record the customers they talked to and recorded without consent without a warrant) to be reviewed by management later - credit card numbers and all. There was also the incident of firing a woman on the grounds of morality for activites outside work hours (illegal), and not firing the two men she was with - a little bit of Taliban mixed with a desire to own employees like slaves in that managers head.

    Don't take this as an anti-US rant - the entire country is not made up of executives that act like Banditos.