Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program

Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program(polytechnitis.blogspot.gr)

34 points by jtsagata 13 years ago | 25 comments

leke 13 years ago |

Even being a Linux fan boy, I still hate OpenOffice/Libre because it's so clunky and doesn't play as nice as MS Office when you need to do some complicated things for the workplace. I actually even prefer Google docs now over OpenOffice and find the gmail/Drive integration so handy. As for the Greece thing, MS has a good product (Office), but a bad OS (for the money they charge). They need to approach this differently, like porting Office to Linux.

slurry 13 years ago | |

Open/LibreOffice has never been that great and if I were considering a big install of it the fact that it's under Apache stewardship would give me pause. Apache does very good work but their specialty is server-side, highly-configurable, large systems that take a fair amount of skill to get up and running.

If I had to guess what direction OO development is headed in, I'd say things are headed in a more service-oriented architecture direction. It'll be great if you want a customed-out integrated groupware, collaboration, data analysis and document management solution, and you've got a large, skilled IT staff (and/or Oracle or IBM service contract) to set it up. I doubt it's going to be any good for standalone plain vanilla desktop apps.

Could be I'm wrong about this; but it's open to question where this is headed.

pktoss 13 years ago | | |

LibreOffice is not Apache Licensed or driven by Apache. It is a fork lead by "The Document Foundation". You can read http://www.documentfoundation.org/.

IvarTJ 13 years ago | |

I personally prefer AbiWord because of the startup time, but it failed to display Word document vector graphics at all. Open/LibreOffice did not display them correctly at first, but displayed them better in later versions. Later I managed to get some Windows systems to convert the docs to PDF so that I could read them on Linux.

I am very grateful for the work that has been put into open-source office software, and know that they face an uphill battle with the peculiarities of Microsoft's formats.

pippy 13 years ago | |

Microsoft Office is a superior experience to its OpenSource competitors, and definitely worth the cost.

However OpenOffice & LibreOffice (and possibly Google Docs) are functionality equivalent, and use open source standards. This raises the biggest question with OpenSource products: is the poor experience worth no vendor lock in?

Given Greek austerity mesures, compatibility assurance, the educational use of the product, and it will force MS to compete it's best Greece uses OpenSource.

stephen_g 13 years ago | |

MS Office file type import is one area where LibreOffice has been making major strides recently. The latest version, and 4.0 which is coming soon has greatly improved support.

It's nice to actually see it quickly improving now they've forked, given how stagnant Open Office development was when Sun (and then Oracle) was in charge.

shmerl 13 years ago |

MS is not a newcomer to pushing their solutions to schools through government channels. It's their way to prevent people from learning about alternatives. Corruption is all around in these schemes.

kyberias 13 years ago |

What a load of crap. Grow up people. Microsoft Office is worth every single cent.

richardjordan 13 years ago | |

That's your opinion on the pricing of MS Office and its commercial value - correct or otherwise. However, I think the question is whether it makes sense to mandate its use in the education system, in several years time, given the rapidly changing commercial realities and - good value for businesses or not - the high price of using Microsoft products in such an environment by a government that is virtually bankrupt.

You may or may not be right on the value of MS Office, but I think its use in this context is easily and legitimately challenged.

bitwize 13 years ago | | |

"Rapidly changing commercial realities" haven't produced a tool as useful or flexible for analyzing large amounts of financial data as Excel. They also haven't produced an alternative word processor that can correctly read and format any arbitrary Word document. Go ahead, try and tell your boss that you never read that important memo he sent out because your office suite mangled the document.

For interacting with the business world, Microsoft Office is absolutely essential -- a bargain at thrice the price.

dbaupp 13 years ago | | |

I'm not sure if you were trying to make this point or not, but the vendor lock-in that MS gets from education must be massive: millions of students grow up using only MS software, it's what they get used to and practiced in, so they stick with it forever.

andmarios 13 years ago | |

You should grow up. Greece is in the midst of an economic crisis. Even if MS Office does worth its price (I disagree), Greece has to do everything it can to lower its operating expenses.

The equivalent to your argument, is a person making 20,000€/year, asking for a small family car and you suggest a Porsche because "it worths every single cent".

shmerl 13 years ago | |

No, it doesn't. Especially for schools - it's a pointless waste of money and sneaky tactic by MS to hook students on their products early on. Schools should ditch MS and adopt open source solutions for the sake of the future generations.

pixl97 13 years ago | |

Of course Microsoft software is worth every cent (dollars many of them) that Microsoft thinks it is, the question here is, 'Is public debate of Microsoft's sales to the schools of Greece up for public debate?'.

Microsoft certainly wants to be a sole supplier on a privately discussed contract. If I were trying to maximize my profits, I'd want exactly the same.

_delirium 13 years ago |

Hmm, there's a mixture of interesting and fairly mundane stuff in here. On the mundane side: one of the points is that Microsoft objects to the requirement to procure the lowest-price software that meets the specs, because there is FOSS that meets many of the specs (as written) and it's no-cost, therefore no commercial supplier can possibly compete. That's an argument you'd expect any commercial software supplier to make, and in fact they do make that argument pretty much anywhere those kinds of procurement rules come up. Whether making that argument is trying to fleece the government or not probably depends on whether you agree with commercial software providers' arguments about benefits of their software vs. FOSS, e.g. in functionality and/or total cost of ownership.

gizmo686 13 years ago | |

If a competitor offers a product/price pairing that the consumer likes more than your product/price pairing, then you competetor makes the sale. If MS cannot compete on price, they need to compete on quality.

codeka 13 years ago |

I think the relative merits of Microsoft Office vs. other solutions is something that's been hashed out many, many times. But I do find interesting the request on Microsoft's part for a face-to-face meeting. They don't specifically say a "private" face-to-face meeting, but that seems implied.

Presumably if they want to give discounts or special deals they don't want to do it publicly where everybody (including competitors and future potential customers) can see, but I wonder if this sort of tactic is something that's even tenable going forward? With so many of these contracts coming into the open, will they be able to continue giving discounts on a customer-by-customer basis?