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Microsoft Pushes Windows To Battle Linux In Africa
ThousandStars writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft has been making a concerted effort to promote Windows in Africa, pushing Windows over Linux in very poor countries that haven't been locked into a single operating system. From the article: 'To that end, it has established a presence in 13 countries, donated Windows for thousands of school computers, and funded programs for entrepreneurs and the young. It also has used aggressive business tactics, some aimed at its biggest threat in the region: Linux ...'"
Hmm, that's a hell of a lot of chutzpah from Microsoft. Perhaps they should do a little research into the origin of the word Ubuntu.
Later on, the article covers the Mandriva / Microsoft in Nigeria battle that was covered here before:
"TSC approached Mandriva SA, a French company that sells a Linux version. Believing Microsoft had offered its $3 package, Mandriva proposed a $3 price for a Linux operating system, plus about $2 for other software, say people familiar with the situation. In August 2007, TSC issued a purchase order for Mandriva Linux, and the laptop's Taiwanese manufacturer began loading it.
Microsoft continued to push Windows. It offered its XP and Office software for about $45 per machine, says Nyimbi Odero, then TSC's chief executive.
Mr. Odero says Microsoft wanted TSC to delete Linux from the initial shipments of Classmates. He says Microsoft proposed a way to "make it worth your while" through a joint-marketing agreement. According to a draft agreement Microsoft sent to TSC last Sept. 13, Microsoft would pay TSC to fund "certain marketing activities to encourage the sale and distribution" of Microsoft products. Mr. Odero says Microsoft made it clear that TSC wouldn't really be expected to market the products, but could keep the money as an incentive to replace Linux with Windows."
(for anyone who doesn't know, I work for Mandriva).
What is it with people like you? Have you been there? no!
The reason for poverty is not lack of resources, it is lack of a legal structure that delivers contract enforcement. This means that it is impossible to ahve organisations bigger than a small family with any degree of confidence, except by the use of force.
This is a cultural problem. (Helped immensely by the spread of Christianity and democracy).
Computers are immensely powerful in the 3rd world becausee the enable family-sized organisations to do massively bigger projects.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Well in this case, Africa might be just one of those places. I mean ,what is MS going to do? Give away Windows licenses for free, and throw in Vista-capable PC's as well? (sorry, didn't read the TFA).
What is MS going to do? Bribe high-ranking government officials, that's what. Sorry to say this, but I think MS is going to have a very easy time in most african countries, to have Linux replaced by MS in all schools and government institutions.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
but they are now willing to pay millions going after a market so poor they have little to no computer infrastructure. THAT is somewhat new to them. Typically, the left these markets alone and dumped billions into marketing to markets where there was a support system and more of a chance of an ROI out 5 years but probably under 10 years.
Sub-Saharan Africa? They're probably looking out 20+ years if even that. But mostly, I think what they are doing is blocking as many public successes of GNU/Linux in these areas. Did you notice how quick they got on the anti-OLPC marketing campaign? They dumped $25 million into Egypt alone so that they'd be a Windows-only government and there are dozens more around the world.
So this is somewhat new for them and it's probably costing them something close to $1 billion annually in these marketing/services/training/etc "partnerships". All to keep GNU/Linux from finding a home in a hut or two in areas like sub-Saharan Africa. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Hmm. I use both Powershell and bash, and Powershell is rather good ; easier to use than bash in many respects.
It does have it's downfalls ; because it's primary design is to pass objects and not bytestreams down the pipeline, getting the output formatted exactly how you want it can end up with you writing a little more code than you wanted, if you have strict format requirements.
While *nix does have shells that can use objects (because they are Python flavoured), it doesn't have anything quite like Powershell. IMHO the syntax is easier to grok than bash, and you don't have to learn at least one text-processing language (sed, grep, awk) to make it useful[1][2], because the data you want is most often accessible as a property.
I find *nix to be a far more flexible and powerful operating system than Windows, it beats it on plenty of criteria, but Powershell is not one of them.
[1] although regular expressions are useful to learn, as they are for most shells. .NET programmers in particular can leverage their existing knowledge of the .NET APIs
[2]
I have yet to see Linux platform DELIVER ANYTHING the entire world wants to use, in an easy to manage, easy to interact with format. I tried installing redhat a few times back in the 90s and after banging my head a few times to actually get it working I thought to myself "Oh. Sweet. Free Civ and data management I DONT NEED."
The 90s? That is relevant how? It is about as useful as my telling you that Mandriva 2009 is much better than Windows 3.1. What is relevant is how current Linux versions compare to current Windows versions.
There is a lot of software for Linux, and obtainning and installing it is much easier and faster than for Windows.
I guess what Im really saying is, most Linux/open source advocates do it for the rebellion not because they have a better product to promote
Wrong. Most Linux users use it because they think it is better. Those who want to use open source have good motives to do so (avoiding lock in, auditable security). The biggest advantages of Linux are that it is easy, and that it is flexible. All your software is managed an upgraded using a single GUI interface, some distros can even do major version upgrade with a few mouse clicks - try upgrading from XP to Vista that way!
As for the flexibility you can get distros for geeks (Gentoo, Slack, Arch), normal users desktops (Ubuntu, Mandriva, SuSe), servers (Debian, Red Hat), old hardware (Puppy, Damn Small Linux).
As a (primarily) Linux user myself, my best advice to you is that you shouldn't use Linux unless you can think of a reason to do so.
But please do not tar those of us who do use it as "rebels". I myself work for a telecoms company where Linux has "swept the floor" as the core OS for most of the telephony products that we sell. No, it hasn't particularly displaced Windows in doing so, more the commercial UNIXes like Solaris and HP-UX and, if anything, we use Windows to handle most of the client-side stuff for integration into corporate networks.
But please don't pretend to have any understanding of why people like me use Linux as their primary OS at home because your comments show your ignorance. I fully accept that Linux lacks a lot of the Adobe-type applications and other things that a lot of existing Windows people currently want to use but please remember that it is not Linux's fault that is the case - rather the Adobes of the world who just haven't decided to port those apps across as of yet.
However, for most users like me who just do a bit of photo and graphics work, The GIMP more than suffices. Likewise, I need to do a few relatively straightforward spreadsheets, documents and presentations so OpenOffice is good enough for me. Plus I'm a shell and PERL monkey so I have access to tremendous automation power at the Linux shell prompt which, even if I wanted to do something similar in Windows, would need a steep learning curve with VB, DotNet or something else, assuming it was even possible.
I also like gaming and there's plenty of Linux games that I play, thanks mostly to the Open Sourcing of games engines like Doom and Quake. Yes, I keep XP around to play some more modern stuff (and because sometimes I need MS Office also) but even if you look at my XP machines, you'll see most of the tools I use are OSS or free ones like Firefox, OpenOffice, PuTTY, WinSCP, The GIMP, Irfanview, ImgBurn, etc. etc.
Unfortunately, you've made two very obtuse comments which only serve to highlight your total lack of Linux knowledge:
1. Linux is a lot more mature now than the last time you installed it during the 90s (just like Windows XP is a much better OS than Windows 95 and 98 were), and
2. Linux is really just the kernel and most of the other nice useful bits that go into an average Linux distro also happen to have Windows ports as well - so choosing not to use free software on the basis that "if it was good you could sell it" is just doing yourself a dis-service, no-one else.
Yes, I'd love to be in a situation where one OS could do everything I needed to do but the fact is neither Linux or Windows fit that requirement at this moment in time. However, because I'm not a zealot and prefer just to use the "right tool for the job", I really don't give a toss whether an application needs Linux or Windows to run - I just get on and use whatever I need to when I need to, satisfied in the knowledge that most of the stuff I use is truly free to use, and the commercial software I use is fully licensed.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Looking at some Microsoft dlls you can see they're signed by Thawt which is the company Mark Shuttleworth sold for millions, so in a round-a-bout kind of way Microsoft funded the ability for Mark to start Ubuntu which is now competing with Microsoft in Africa. Woops.