In some nations this would be illegal as Word is no ISO standard. You cannotn require someone to buy a specific product. It would contravene competition laws. Anyway, it is worth to start a law suit.
The purpose of OpenOffice support is to drive Microsoft Office costs down.
Ask your government to pay 50 engineers to work on OpenOffice improvement and the world can entirely get rid off Microsoft Office license fees. You will be able to select between Microsoft Office ande a much improved OpenOffice on Linux as you like. It is just a matter of investment in development. Instead our governments pay overpriced license costs and feed the fat cat.
I don't think so, OpenOffice is the better transition for Word users. I don't want to use Ribbon and I don't like an interface to be forced upon me which I cannot configure.
Well, a company as Microsoft can simply run a torrent tracker of its own or let it run. And a "we just offer legal torrents" site.
Why don't they integrate bittorrent in their OS? After all this is how all their customers get the lastest software and movies with. Microsoft should not bow down to Hollywood.
Look, there was also a transition from CVS to SVN and SVN was designed to adapt to user expectations. If the future is Git, so be it. For most users a versioning system has to serve very limited purposes.
Look, people get killed by dictatorial regimes all around the world and no one notices it.
People against tanks wasn't invented in China. Tiananmensquare is great as a symbol because it demasked the Chinese regime. With Tiananmen Quare some person might get killed but it is not important if someone gets killed for the success of the scenario. Tiananmen had strong effects for the overthrow of Middle European Communist governments because the events and the solidarity notes of their government officials seriously undermined the regimes.
In the same sense people should not be concerned that Microsoft as the opponent of interests will escalate the situation as it did in MA or with Open XML and "win" because the political price it has to pay is far too high and as long as others don't feel deterred by the aggressions any victory is phyrric. Who would care what software is running in the state of MA? But what happened there stimulated international outrage and hit other dominos. That is the strange thing to consider. By fighting open policies the monster grows for Microsoft. They win MA and the next state shows up.
Think Monsanto against Percy Schmeisser. The whole case of the ruthless company is a brilliant propaganda piece for the anti-life patent movement. Ofn course the propaganda line is to paint Monsanto as the bad guy they are. If you can expose your opponent as the bad guy he is all violations of commonly shared beliefs and values he has to commit to win against your "good cause" fire heavily back. It becomes tragic for the opponent: Either the opponent gives up or he "wins". The task for you would therefore not be to win but to maximize the political damage because you don't really depend on winning it.
Marx was an intellectual and a great polemic writer. I would love to read his criticism of the Soviet empire.
Unanswered is the digital good scenario. Windows is "egalitarian" because it is all the same for everyone. As a rich man you cannot buy a better windows with less bugs. At least one rich man buys a better Linux.
You can buy the world's fastest x86 machine and in five years your poor neighbors do not want to receive the electronic waste from you because they run faster machines.
1. You call for preferential treatment of open source and Linux migration and massive funding. 2. Microsoft lobbies waters it down to open standards or platform independence and moderate coexistence. 3. Win
Or on the procurement side: 1. You make buzz about Linux migration 2. Microsoft offers discounts. 3. Win
For getting those discounts governments and larged customers have to invest in alternatives as Linux. It would be not wise to play nice with Microsoft.
Consider how little money is currently invested in the development of Linux and other free software. Small amounts of government investment can make a huge difference. Linux development is far more efficient. For believers in running code origin does not matter.
Put it in the context of what happened in China. Microsoft tried to crack down on software piracy. Then the Chinese threatened to use Linux and was able to continue to use Windows virtually for free.
Exactly. And it just works. Right now no pressure group actually lobbies for Linux migration. It is simple procurement economics. Microsoft will end up to pay governments for using their products. Remember when they paid AOL for using the IE engine instead of gecko developed by AOL?
It is a domino effect agenda. Microsoft cannot afford to lose the deal and all procurement departments worldwide are about to use the same trick. So it is actually not important if Vietnam actually changes to Linux. It is like innocent civilians you put in front of a tank. Crushing them only escalates as long as media attention is covering the incident. Microsoft is in a difficult situation. They have to use ruthless lobbying tactics and these tactics escalate the conflict and strengthen the "resistance" to their products.
Well, it is the track. You call for open source mandates and open standards will be the compromise. You chose Linux and Microsoft will cut your license fees to zero and pay your government for not taking it.
You cannot negotiate with a compromise. You need to negotiate for preferential treatment.
In my nation parties are refunded based on election results. The negative side effect is that parties become dependend on the government and elections are less passionate.
Maybe the US election system needs fundamental reform but this is a poor outsider advice and difficult to get.
The Us election system creates a more or less stable government structure, better than most other systems worldwide. It would be great if the rest of the world would abide at least to these standards and have a president as professional as Obama.
The more constuctive criticism of a political system the higher the likelihood for reform. "Revolutions" are violent and disruptive changes, most of the times for the worse. No sane person can aim for that unless he wants to see things blow up.
The rationale is the same as with routers or Mac OS X
Let's put yourself in the seat of Nintendo, Sony etc. Why not copy the Apple OS X strategy? Don't waste your resources on the OS base level, reuse what is there.
This doesn't exclude a proprietary layer on top of it. After all they don't sell software but consoles.
Right now the Wine developers do not even implement it because they feel its irrelevant.
And the console competitors that are expected adopt Linux as a base OS? Just another argument more to standardise on another platform because they do not want to get locked in. Is WII Xbox compatible? PS? -- ok ok next question.
Slashdot Mirror
In some nations this would be illegal as Word is no ISO standard. You cannotn require someone to buy a specific product. It would contravene competition laws. Anyway, it is worth to start a law suit.
Everyone in the office uses Firefox. So would a IE skin make you feel insecure.
The purpose of OpenOffice support is to drive Microsoft Office costs down.
Ask your government to pay 50 engineers to work on OpenOffice improvement and the world can entirely get rid off Microsoft Office license fees. You will be able to select between Microsoft Office ande a much improved OpenOffice on Linux as you like. It is just a matter of investment in development. Instead our governments pay overpriced license costs and feed the fat cat.
I don't think so, OpenOffice is the better transition for Word users. I don't want to use Ribbon and I don't like an interface to be forced upon me which I cannot configure.
But software wars are more fun and real. And you can really make a difference...
Actually what you say is wrong. Geeks have much more social skills. Society is a problem to be fixed.
That would be something worth to watch. If they pull this expect a multi-annual competition complaint party.
They didn't have enough copies of Win7 on stock.
Well, a company as Microsoft can simply run a torrent tracker of its own or let it run. And a "we just offer legal torrents" site.
Why don't they integrate bittorrent in their OS? After all this is how all their customers get the lastest software and movies with. Microsoft should not bow down to Hollywood.
Look, there was also a transition from CVS to SVN and SVN was designed to adapt to user expectations. If the future is Git, so be it. For most users a versioning system has to serve very limited purposes.
Look, people get killed by dictatorial regimes all around the world and no one notices it.
People against tanks wasn't invented in China. Tiananmensquare is great as a symbol because it demasked the Chinese regime. With Tiananmen Quare some person might get killed but it is not important if someone gets killed for the success of the scenario. Tiananmen had strong effects for the overthrow of Middle European Communist governments because the events and the solidarity notes of their government officials seriously undermined the regimes.
In the same sense people should not be concerned that Microsoft as the opponent of interests will escalate the situation as it did in MA or with Open XML and "win" because the political price it has to pay is far too high and as long as others don't feel deterred by the aggressions any victory is phyrric. Who would care what software is running in the state of MA? But what happened there stimulated international outrage and hit other dominos. That is the strange thing to consider. By fighting open policies the monster grows for Microsoft. They win MA and the next state shows up.
Think Monsanto against Percy Schmeisser. The whole case of the ruthless company is a brilliant propaganda piece for the anti-life patent movement. Ofn course the propaganda line is to paint Monsanto as the bad guy they are. If you can expose your opponent as the bad guy he is all violations of commonly shared beliefs and values he has to commit to win against your "good cause" fire heavily back. It becomes tragic for the opponent: Either the opponent gives up or he "wins". The task for you would therefore not be to win but to maximize the political damage because you don't really depend on winning it.
No one gets killed in IT.
Marx was an intellectual and a great polemic writer. I would love to read his criticism of the Soviet empire.
Unanswered is the digital good scenario. Windows is "egalitarian" because it is all the same for everyone. As a rich man you cannot buy a better windows with less bugs. At least one rich man buys a better Linux.
You can buy the world's fastest x86 machine and in five years your poor neighbors do not want to receive the electronic waste from you because they run faster machines.
fully agree. But you miss the point that this is about a scenario for procurement negotiations.
1. You call for preferential treatment of open source and Linux migration and massive funding.
2. Microsoft lobbies waters it down to open standards or platform independence and moderate coexistence.
3. Win
Or on the procurement side:
1. You make buzz about Linux migration
2. Microsoft offers discounts.
3. Win
For getting those discounts governments and larged customers have to invest in alternatives as Linux. It would be not wise to play nice with Microsoft.
Other scenario:
1. You call for open standards
2. Microsoft redefines open standards as RAND and invests massively in lobbying, long struggle.
3. ???
Consider how little money is currently invested in the development of Linux and other free software. Small amounts of government investment can make a huge difference. Linux development is far more efficient. For believers in running code origin does not matter.
Put it in the context of what happened in China. Microsoft tried to crack down on software piracy. Then the Chinese threatened to use Linux and was able to continue to use Windows virtually for free.
Exactly. And it just works. Right now no pressure group actually lobbies for Linux migration. It is simple procurement economics. Microsoft will end up to pay governments for using their products. Remember when they paid AOL for using the IE engine instead of gecko developed by AOL?
It is a domino effect agenda. Microsoft cannot afford to lose the deal and all procurement departments worldwide are about to use the same trick. So it is actually not important if Vietnam actually changes to Linux. It is like innocent civilians you put in front of a tank. Crushing them only escalates as long as media attention is covering the incident. Microsoft is in a difficult situation. They have to use ruthless lobbying tactics and these tactics escalate the conflict and strengthen the "resistance" to their products.
Well, it is the track. You call for open source mandates and open standards will be the compromise. You chose Linux and Microsoft will cut your license fees to zero and pay your government for not taking it.
You cannot negotiate with a compromise. You need to negotiate for preferential treatment.
In my nation parties are refunded based on election results. The negative side effect is that parties become dependend on the government and elections are less passionate.
You just need to mainstream the assert that the RIAA is the new tobacco... ;-) One down, one to go.
Maybe the US election system needs fundamental reform but this is a poor outsider advice and difficult to get.
The Us election system creates a more or less stable government structure, better than most other systems worldwide. It would be great if the rest of the world would abide at least to these standards and have a president as professional as Obama.
The more constuctive criticism of a political system the higher the likelihood for reform. "Revolutions" are violent and disruptive changes, most of the times for the worse. No sane person can aim for that unless he wants to see things blow up.
The rationale is the same as with routers or Mac OS X
Let's put yourself in the seat of Nintendo, Sony etc. Why not copy the Apple OS X strategy? Don't waste your resources on the OS base level, reuse what is there.
This doesn't exclude a proprietary layer on top of it. After all they don't sell software but consoles.
Right now the Wine developers do not even implement it because they feel its irrelevant.
And the console competitors that are expected adopt Linux as a base OS? Just another argument more to standardise on another platform because they do not want to get locked in. Is WII Xbox compatible? PS? -- ok ok next question.
Freifunk or Free 700?
At least Microsoft buys into the Cloud concept.