
Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program - jtsagata
http://polytechnitis.blogspot.gr/2012/12/debating-microsoft-comments-for-greek.html#more
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leke
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.

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slurry
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.

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pktoss
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/>.

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shmerl
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.

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

~~~
richardjordan
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
"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.

~~~
codeka
I've never seen an office application that so badly mangles a Word document
that you can't even _read_ it. 100% fidelity is not going to happen, but
unless you're designing brochures or things for print, you don't _need_ 100%
fidelity.

~~~
bitwize
_I've never seen an office application that so badly mangles a Word document
that you can't even read it._

Back in a former job, I was managing documents for a big project. The
government mandated the use of Word format. When I opened some of the
documents up in LibreOffice, only a single, completely blank page was visible.
This tended to happen with .docx files but not with .doc files.

So YES, open source office suites DO mangle Microsoft Office documents beyond
readability. The only thing that's guaranteed to work is Microsoft Office, so
governments and businesses will keep using it.

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_delirium
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
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.

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codeka
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?

