After years of trying to get FOSS into companies the idea is usually well received until they find out that some, and I often quote the amount 5-10% of their several years worth of MS Office docs, won't open cleanly in OO.org.
The meer thought of having to readjust tables, images, headers, footers etc in their documents every time they open an old doc in the noew program plus the hassle of converting Excel macros to OO.org kills any chance of them changing over. Seriously, you may as well tell them that they'll get AIDS as soon as they open OO and it'd have the same effect.
Microsoft has a massive Office suite monopoly and control of the.doc,.xls formats has ensured it stays that way. The fact that they are trying to stop the EU from forcing them to open their XML formats to GPL'd software is purely and simply because if they lose the exclusivity of Offices formats and the hooks into Exchange they are in deep shit.
Our neighbour goes to McDonalds in the local High Street to get his daughter a Happy Meal. The place is deserted and I mean no customers at all. As he's walking to the counter he hears one staff member comment to another "Quiet in here tonight isn't it" and the answer "Yeah well, bloody Dr Who starts in 5 minutes dunnit".
It'd be interesting to see the sales rates in take aways as well as the water and power consumption immedaiately prior to and following the series finale.
Having grown up in 1970's Britain I can remember when the whole bloody country ran on monopolies. You wanted a phone? The GPO (Genmeral Post Office)_ would rent you one which looked the same as everyone elses. You couldn't actually connect another phone yourself as they also owned the socket on the wall and you had to call a GPO engineer out to do ANY work on the phone(s) on YOUR property.
You bought Gas from British Gas and electricity from the Electricity Board. Now if you were in a small town with one Gas station and a few shops you could always drive to another town. If you wanted to get your utilities from another supplier here you would have to sold up and emigrated. Alternatively you could have got on a train (British Rail) and gone somehwere e.g. London, to get on a London Transport (nationlised monopoly) train or bus etc. etc..
However, the UK has denationlised 99% of this lot and the difference is incredible in terms of both cost and performance from all the major utilities except the raileways which are still shite and the NHS which the majority of Brits still want to be freely available and publicly funded.
Looking at the Microsoft situation, I can see all the failings that were apparent when the UK was country of monopolies, the arrogance, the lack of imagination etc. are all reminiscent of the crap old days in the UK. The fact that they are now starting to respond to their customers concerns like security etc. has only been apparent since Linux starting hurting them and I really do believe that Microsoft's customers are benefitting as a result. OK so the Media player trials were, to be quite honest, a waste of time and money and long term they will make no difference whatsoever.
Going back to the phone analogy, once people had a choice, the GPO (split in two - BT (comms) and the post office (postal)) actually started trying harder and the fact that there are now three major comms companies in the UK keeps them from complacency and all because now you can have a competitors line run into your house and one phone will do just as good a job as one from another provider. If the EU really wants to force MS into a competitive market they need to create a similar situation and the only way they'll do that is by forcing the opening up of APIs and file formats so that any software provider can compete on an equal footing. Anything else is basically farting around and a waste of the EC's taxpayer's time and money.
If you have a 95% majority control of desktops then you are pretty much in control as long as you can make it too expensive for anyone to swap even to a free product. Short of paying businesses the costs involved in transferring their existing documents to a different format there's not much I caould do to convert them.
Anyhows, I think we could go like this forever and although I quite enjoy a decent discussion there are new threads to deal with;)
Shall we agree to disagree. Things twist and turn so quickly now that anything could happen. Life'd be boring otherwise..
Absolutely. I work in a school now and am rolling Linux out on servers. The first to go was the CD Server. We already had a CD server that runs on NT4 but requires an upgrade for 2000/2003. A downloaded Linux disk and a 2.4GHz P4 we had laying around sorted that. Cost saved? £800.
Next was print quota software that was £1200 to replace. Pykota and Postgres meant we could re-use old PCs and save the disposal costs that we'd pay otherwise.
The 6 NT servers are going and being replaced with Mandrake running on three dual CPU servers with all the student accounts beiong pushed onto Postfix/Squirrelmail saving 100+ exchange CALs. The administration side will stick with exchange for a while for the calendaring and the ability to generate NTConfig.pol files for policies via Samba.
At the end of this, we have saved a fortune that has allowed us to upgrade every PC in the school. There is no way, repeat NO WAY that a cut down version of Windows could have allowed us to do this as there would still have been licences somewhere along the way and the lack of hassle that Linux gives us means we can spend more time supporting the users.
XP is still on the desktops but I can't help but think that that may not be forever.
The problem of monopoly is one that is one that has been known since the 1700's. Adam Smith, the person generally condsidered to be the father of free market economics was a staunch anti-monopolist. To quote from a biog:
Smith was almost fanatical in his opposition to any kind of monopoly power, which he defined as the power of a seller to maintain a price for an indefinite time above its natural price. Indeed, he asserted that trade secrets confer a monopoly advantage and are contrary to the principles of a free market. He would surely have strongly opposed current efforts by market libertarians to strengthen corporate monopoly control of intellectual property rights through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The idea that a major corporation might have exclusive control over a lifesaving drug or device and thereby be able to charge whatever the market will bear would have been anathema to him.
The words of Adam Smith are regularly used to prop up the claims of the existance of a free market but sadly, like many things in the media led world, how something is described and how it really is do not always meet up.
OK, so you can create something better than Word but unless you can take all those backed up Word docs and open, modify and save them without loss or modification of data or file integrity it won't matter, people will still take the easiest route e.g. the next version of Office.
Ironically, it seems that in order to protect the freedoms of SMEs to operate to full potential in a global, corporation dominated marketplace, regulation is required. Paradoxical but then hell, life's never straightforward.
I spent four years selling Linux to business server and desktop. The server side wasn't too difficult as most people don't notice any difference but the client side was remarkable in so much as people were receptive to the potential of swapping to OpenOffice or Star Office but only to the point where they asked if it was compatible with MS Office.
Not wanting to has the shit bounce back at a later date I told the truth as I saw it, i.e. In 90 - 95% of cases yes, but when you have tables, forms, macros etc., they may require some reformatting, that was the end of the story. No shit, the copnversation stopped there. No OpenOffice or Star Office even on Windows and without considering any switch to Linux at all. These people work on the principle that they may generate in excess of a hundred word docs a day. If they have a years worth of docs backed up and 5% of them need to be reformatted or have macros then there's no way they are going to anything other than upgrade to the next version of MS Office simply because the time spent pissing around would cost a fortune. What happens for instance, if they have a collection of large spreadsheets and the filtering cocks up and turns a zero into two zeros? Does the word chaos ring any bells?
Simply, it doesn't make the slightest difference how good OO.org or Star Office become. If they can't be guaranteed to open Office files with 100% compatibility, the vast majority of business users will stick with office and hence Windows and the monopoly will continue.
Free markets are fine but if you allow monopolies to exist seemingly with the blessing of the state authorities you may as well nationalise and have done with it.
"And the fucking idiots at/. back in '98 thought the answer was to knee cap microsoft instead of promoting competition." "Competition is good. It's the whole basis of free market capitalism."
Hmmmm, couldn't agree more that you need competition in a free market economy. Problem is it exists only in a limited capacity i.e. all markets are free but some a more free than others depending on how rich you are and how much you offer as bri...., oops sorry, contributions to those who have the power to change things.
The real keystone of Microsoft's monopoly is not Media Player, IE or any of the other programs that they were hauled into Anti Trust for and I'd still reckon that Firefox is having bugger all effect on Microsoft's illegaly dominant position.
Office is the thing that props up the monopoly and unless someone on high introduces real competition by "kneecapping" Microsoft i.e. force the revealing of the office file formats with no conditions attached or force inclusion of full, uncrippled.odt or.sxw support and their matching spreadsheet, presentation etc. formats as a filter option in Office, MS will stay as the only choice for any business that needs to deal with the outside world.
Masybe the fucking idiots at/. are the only ones bright enough to realise this as it seems to have escaped every politician, lawyer and judge they've been up in front of.
Not only that but by heavily discounting or giving it away for free directly after the release of a report like this it would be hard to deny that it was an act of predatory pricing which comes under the anti-trust banner.
Were they to "donate" software to schools it could also be argued that they were "donating" software in the same way that a burglar in the dock may "donate" £500 to a member of the jury.
For MS to escape accusations of PP they would have to sell at a price that they would be willing to maintain long after the competition were dead and buried and any price rise would have to be provably related to a rise in production costs.
Showing how much better Windows is than Linux it would be interesting to have the following stats to make sense of it all:
1) How many surveys did Microsoft commission on this subject?
2) What percentage went through the shredder because they didn't say what MS wanted?
Microsoft sees a marketplace with Linux in it as a battlefield and as the sayings go, all's fair in Love and war and the first casualty of war is the truth.
As a lapsed Methodist I can't help but think that a second coming would be a great thing to see. OK so if christianity is right I'm due to spend eternity on the end of a toasting fork but at least I'll get to see all those who've used the bible, Quran, etc. to justify their own selfish, greed and hate fuelled actions frying as well.
What's even more satisfying is that as I'm sure that all the Bush's, Blairs, Bin Laden's and others who dispense death with God as their justification is also a devout aethiest they won't be expecting it either.
Remember, It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a politician to give you an honest answer.
I must admit that this is one of those occasions where I wished I hadn't hit the submit button so fast.
I still can't understand why Office has evaded the anti-trust sights for so long as it is the one thing has stopped people I've tried flogging Linux to from taking the plunge. On the whole, Media Player, IE and the rest have had zero effect on people's choice of OS in every office I've been into and while they were the subject of the cases so far I can't see anything changing until Office is addressed.
Anyhow, I cocked up on this one and stand corrected
You fit a missile with a Linux kernel. Does this mean that every time you distribute the software by nuking someone you have to drop a copy of the source code in the crater afterwards:)?
I left school in 1979 at which point I'd been wearing glasses for 3 years. After 10 years working in electronics surrounded by scopes, signal generators and monitors I went into IT and have been sitting in front of CRTs ever since.
I had my eyes checked in 1999 and was prescribed new glasses for far-sightedness. This year I got them tested again, a reckless act given my family's history of Glaucoma but there you go, and the prescription had not changed in 6 years. All this after spending at least 12-14 hours a day in front of a CRT.
Whether there are any other effects I don't know but I did lose my sense of direction when I used to sit in a screened room surrounded by RF test kit all day. This returned upon leaving the job but my eyes were screwed up long before that.
From a purely personal viewpoint I suspect that that flat screens are popular due more to a cool look factor than anything else. The only flat screen I've ever seen that could match a CRT was a £700 Apple job, all the rest seem shite (picture wise) in comparison to a CRT that costs less than half the price.
Slashdot Mirror
After years of trying to get FOSS into companies the idea is usually well received until they find out that some, and I often quote the amount 5-10% of their several years worth of MS Office docs, won't open cleanly in OO.org.
.doc,.xls formats has ensured it stays that way. The fact that they are trying to stop the EU from forcing them to open their XML formats to GPL'd software is purely and simply because if they lose the exclusivity of Offices formats and the hooks into Exchange they are in deep shit.
The meer thought of having to readjust tables, images, headers, footers etc in their documents every time they open an old doc in the noew program plus the hassle of converting Excel macros to OO.org kills any chance of them changing over. Seriously, you may as well tell them that they'll get AIDS as soon as they open OO and it'd have the same effect.
Microsoft has a massive Office suite monopoly and control of the
Best Dr Who related quote yet:
Our neighbour goes to McDonalds in the local High Street to get his daughter a Happy Meal.
The place is deserted and I mean no customers at all. As he's walking to the counter he hears one staff member comment to another "Quiet in here tonight isn't it" and the answer "Yeah well, bloody Dr Who starts in 5 minutes dunnit".
It'd be interesting to see the sales rates in take aways as well as the water and power consumption immedaiately prior to and following the series finale.
"A bit more reserved?!?! What about Benny Hill!"
Compared to Debby Does Dallas?
SHIT! That's it!..... That where that bloody Bin Laden's been hiding out!
Yep, true... but the difference is Dr Who was good.
Having grown up in 1970's Britain I can remember when the whole bloody country ran on monopolies. You wanted a phone? The GPO (Genmeral Post Office)_ would rent you one which looked the same as everyone elses. You couldn't actually connect another phone yourself as they also owned the socket on the wall and you had to call a GPO engineer out to do ANY work on the phone(s) on YOUR property.
You bought Gas from British Gas and electricity from the Electricity Board. Now if you were in a small town with one Gas station and a few shops you could always drive to another town. If you wanted to get your utilities from another supplier here you would have to sold up and emigrated. Alternatively you could have got on a train (British Rail) and gone somehwere e.g. London, to get on a London Transport (nationlised monopoly) train or bus etc. etc..
However, the UK has denationlised 99% of this lot and the difference is incredible in terms of both cost and performance from all the major utilities except the raileways which are still shite and the NHS which the majority of Brits still want to be freely available and publicly funded.
Looking at the Microsoft situation, I can see all the failings that were apparent when the UK was country of monopolies, the arrogance, the lack of imagination etc. are all reminiscent of the crap old days in the UK. The fact that they are now starting to respond to their customers concerns like security etc. has only been apparent since Linux starting hurting them and I really do believe that Microsoft's customers are benefitting as a result. OK so the Media player trials were, to be quite honest, a waste of time and money and long term they will make no difference whatsoever.
Going back to the phone analogy, once people had a choice, the GPO (split in two - BT (comms) and the post office (postal)) actually started trying harder and the fact that there are now three major comms companies in the UK keeps them from complacency and all because now you can have a competitors line run into your house and one phone will do just as good a job as one from another provider. If the EU really wants to force MS into a competitive market they need to create a similar situation and the only way they'll do that is by forcing the opening up of APIs and file formats so that any software provider can compete on an equal footing. Anything else is basically farting around and a waste of the EC's taxpayer's time and money.
"Is porn really that profitable? Who pays for porn?"
Teenagers whose parents leave their credit cards laying around.
Like everything, use Windows you have to pay for your zealots, use Linux and get thousands of them for FREE!!!!!
If you have a 95% majority control of desktops then you are pretty much in control as long as you can make it too expensive for anyone to swap even to a free product. Short of paying businesses the costs involved in transferring their existing documents to a different format there's not much I caould do to convert them.
;)
Anyhows, I think we could go like this forever and although I quite enjoy a decent discussion there are new threads to deal with
Shall we agree to disagree. Things twist and turn so quickly now that anything could happen. Life'd be boring otherwise..
Cheers
"so I'm not seeing the savings for the schools."
Absolutely. I work in a school now and am rolling Linux out on servers. The first to go was the CD Server. We already had a CD server that runs on NT4 but requires an upgrade for 2000/2003. A downloaded Linux disk and a 2.4GHz P4 we had laying around sorted that. Cost saved? £800.
Next was print quota software that was £1200 to replace. Pykota and Postgres meant we could re-use old PCs and save the disposal costs that we'd pay otherwise.
The 6 NT servers are going and being replaced with Mandrake running on three dual CPU servers with all the student accounts beiong pushed onto Postfix/Squirrelmail saving 100+ exchange CALs. The administration side will stick with exchange for a while for the calendaring and the ability to generate NTConfig.pol files for policies via Samba.
At the end of this, we have saved a fortune that has allowed us to upgrade every PC in the school. There is no way, repeat NO WAY that a cut down version of Windows could have allowed us to do this as there would still have been licences somewhere along the way and the lack of hassle that Linux gives us means we can spend more time supporting the users.
XP is still on the desktops but I can't help but think that that may not be forever.
The problem of monopoly is one that is one that has been known since the 1700's. Adam Smith, the person generally condsidered to be the father of free market economics was a staunch anti-monopolist. To quote from a biog:
Smith was almost fanatical in his opposition to any kind of monopoly power, which he defined as the power of a seller to maintain a price for an indefinite time above its natural price. Indeed, he asserted that trade secrets confer a monopoly advantage and are contrary to the principles of a free market. He would surely have strongly opposed current efforts by market libertarians to strengthen corporate monopoly control of intellectual property rights through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The idea that a major corporation might have exclusive control over a lifesaving drug or device and thereby be able to charge whatever the market will bear would have been anathema to him.
The words of Adam Smith are regularly used to prop up the claims of the existance of a free market but sadly, like many things in the media led world, how something is described and how it really is do not always meet up.
OK, so you can create something better than Word but unless you can take all those backed up Word docs and open, modify and save them without loss or modification of data or file integrity it won't matter, people will still take the easiest route e.g. the next version of Office.
Ironically, it seems that in order to protect the freedoms of SMEs to operate to full potential in a global, corporation dominated marketplace, regulation is required. Paradoxical but then hell, life's never straightforward.
I spent four years selling Linux to business server and desktop. The server side wasn't too difficult as most people don't notice any difference but the client side was remarkable in so much as people were receptive to the potential of swapping to OpenOffice or Star Office but only to the point where they asked if it was compatible with MS Office.
Not wanting to has the shit bounce back at a later date I told the truth as I saw it, i.e. In 90 - 95% of cases yes, but when you have tables, forms, macros etc., they may require some reformatting, that was the end of the story. No shit, the copnversation stopped there. No OpenOffice or Star Office even on Windows and without considering any switch to Linux at all. These people work on the principle that they may generate in excess of a hundred word docs a day. If they have a years worth of docs backed up and 5% of them need to be reformatted or have macros then there's no way they are going to anything other than upgrade to the next version of MS Office simply because the time spent pissing around would cost a fortune. What happens for instance, if they have a collection of large spreadsheets and the filtering cocks up and turns a zero into two zeros? Does the word chaos ring any bells?
Simply, it doesn't make the slightest difference how good OO.org or Star Office become. If they can't be guaranteed to open Office files with 100% compatibility, the vast majority of business users will stick with office and hence Windows and the monopoly will continue.
Free markets are fine but if you allow monopolies to exist seemingly with the blessing of the state authorities you may as well nationalise and have done with it.
"And the fucking idiots at /. back in '98 thought the answer was to knee cap microsoft instead of promoting competition."
.odt or .sxw support and their matching spreadsheet, presentation etc. formats as a filter option in Office, MS will stay as the only choice for any business that needs to deal with the outside world.
/. are the only ones bright enough to realise this as it seems to have escaped every politician, lawyer and judge they've been up in front of.
"Competition is good. It's the whole basis of free market capitalism."
Hmmmm, couldn't agree more that you need competition in a free market economy. Problem is it exists only in a limited capacity i.e. all markets are free but some a more free than others depending on how rich you are and how much you offer as bri...., oops sorry, contributions to those who have the power to change things.
The real keystone of Microsoft's monopoly is not Media Player, IE or any of the other programs that they were hauled into Anti Trust for and I'd still reckon that Firefox is having bugger all effect on Microsoft's illegaly dominant position.
Office is the thing that props up the monopoly and unless someone on high introduces real competition by "kneecapping" Microsoft i.e. force the revealing of the office file formats with no conditions attached or force inclusion of full, uncrippled
Masybe the fucking idiots at
Not only that but by heavily discounting or giving it away for free directly after the release of a report like this it would be hard to deny that it was an act of predatory pricing which comes under the anti-trust banner.
Were they to "donate" software to schools it could also be argued that they were "donating" software in the same way that a burglar in the dock may "donate" £500 to a member of the jury.
For MS to escape accusations of PP they would have to sell at a price that they would be willing to maintain long after the competition were dead and buried and any price rise would have to be provably related to a rise in production costs.
Showing how much better Windows is than Linux it would be interesting to have the following stats to make sense of it all:
1) How many surveys did Microsoft commission on this subject?
2) What percentage went through the shredder because they didn't say what MS wanted?
Microsoft sees a marketplace with Linux in it as a battlefield and as the sayings go, all's fair in Love and war and the first casualty of war is the truth.
Can someone tell me which 25 so I know what to avoid?
"Microsoft is reachng out to the OSS community and wanting a sit-down to discuss how to better to interoperate with them.
( &^ *&^
April Fools day is over you bastards......
Oh wait.......
No come on, will whoever has the real microsoft plaease put it back, I'm getting... tooooooo...... coooonnnnnffffuuuussseeeedddddddd........
%^$^%*&%^*&^()__)&()&(*^&^%$&$^&%*^*&%&^^(^*&^*
Kernel Panic
As a lapsed Methodist I can't help but think that a second coming would be a great thing to see.
OK so if christianity is right I'm due to spend eternity on the end of a toasting fork but at least I'll get to see all those who've used the bible, Quran, etc. to justify their own selfish, greed and hate fuelled actions frying as well.
What's even more satisfying is that as I'm sure that all the Bush's, Blairs, Bin Laden's and others who dispense death with God as their justification is also a devout aethiest they won't be expecting it either.
Remember, It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a politician to give you an honest answer.
I must admit that this is one of those occasions where I wished I hadn't hit the submit button so fast.
I still can't understand why Office has evaded the anti-trust sights for so long as it is the one thing has stopped people I've tried flogging Linux to from taking the plunge.
On the whole, Media Player, IE and the rest have had zero effect on people's choice of OS in every office I've been into and while they were the subject of the cases so far I can't see anything changing until Office is addressed.
Anyhow, I cocked up on this one and stand corrected
It's debatable as to whether or not MS broke the law.
That's not what what the judges said in the US and the EU.
Maybe we should get the WTO involved to support our intellectual property rights in foreign war zones...
No need. I hear Darl McBride'll be free for employment at some point soon.
You fit a missile with a Linux kernel. Does this mean that every time you distribute the software by nuking someone you have to drop a copy of the source code in the crater afterwards :)?
Because Graphic Artists, like Slashdotters spend lots of time on their own in darkened rooms playing with their computers.
Just remember, the guy who drew this may not have seen a real woman for a significant length of time and may only remember a faint smell of fish.
I left school in 1979 at which point I'd been wearing glasses for 3 years. After 10 years working in electronics surrounded by scopes, signal generators and monitors I went into IT and have been sitting in front of CRTs ever since.
I had my eyes checked in 1999 and was prescribed new glasses for far-sightedness. This year I got them tested again, a reckless act given my family's history of Glaucoma but there you go, and the prescription had not changed in 6 years.
All this after spending at least 12-14 hours a day in front of a CRT.
Whether there are any other effects I don't know but I did lose my sense of direction when I used to sit in a screened room surrounded by RF test kit all day. This returned upon leaving the job but my eyes were screwed up long before that.
From a purely personal viewpoint I suspect that that flat screens are popular due more to a cool look factor than anything else. The only flat screen I've ever seen that could match a CRT was a £700 Apple job, all the rest seem shite (picture wise) in comparison to a CRT that costs less than half the price.
No wonder estate agents and used car salesman have such an easy time