Has he booked it yet?

Story: Brazil may build $100 laptopsTotal Replies: 5
Author Content
sbergman27

Jul 01, 2005
6:19 AM EDT 		Just wondering if BG has booked his flight to Brazil yet, or if he'll book it later today.
PaulFerris

Jul 01, 2005
6:30 AM EDT 		sbergman27: yep, this might be a ploy to lower their Windows procurement costs. As a matter of fact, two years ago I recommended just such a strategy:
Quoting: On top of all of this, Microsoft has made it extremely clear that it's not going to lose any fight to Linux. As usual, the media has access to some really juicy internal sales memos on Microsoft's strategy. It's really amazing how much information leaks out of that company. Even more striking is how often the leaks provide valuable information that can help explain just what a tough competitor Microsoft is.

Regardless, a recent leak involved a "win-at-all-costs" strategy to keep large corporations in the fold. The memo in question made clear that, no matter what, in certain corporate settings a sale was not to be lost to Linux (see "MS 'Slush' Fund Provides Big Discounts to Stop Linux—E-mail," by John Lettice, The Register, May 15, 2003, http://www.theregister.com/content/4/30715.html).

Oddly enough, this provides a really good reason for companies to adopt an open source strategy. For one, it isn't going to cost much to create an evaluation committee to, let's say, look at replacing all corporate desktops with Linux. Granted, it may not be a workable solution for the company; it may be totally unsupportable given the current desktop support staff, Windows inertia of expertise, applications, and so on.

Given the Microsoft sales strategy, however, the rules change. A sizable company with a large Microsoft desktop investment would be crazy not to create a credible internal initiative that evaluates open source.


The link if you're extremely bored (doubtful): http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid...

--FeriCyde

That's from an article 2 years ago in ACM queue
sbergman27

Jul 01, 2005
6:52 AM EDT 		Actually, I think Brazil is pretty serious about Open Source. But it is kinda fun watching Uncle Bill have to fly all over the world trying to keep customers. It's like that game xbill, except it's real life. I hope he's investing in cloning technology, because at some point, he's gonna need it. ;-)

Oh, and he would have to make quite a deal to squeeze XP into a $100 laptop.
cjcox

Jul 01, 2005
10:21 AM EDT 		We've got an office in Brazil.. those rebels!! I love them all!

Nice to see a country that is not owned by Bill Gates.
hkwint

Jul 02, 2005
4:18 AM EDT 		And I always believed Steve Ballmer was an (imperfect) clone of BG? (Flying to Munich when skiing in Switzerland).

Anyway, the news striked me most, because I recently made an estimation of the number of Linux-users for the linux-counter. http://counter.li.org/estimates.php I estimated 29 million Linux users, which is rather conservative for several reasons (for a great deal because it's not clear when somebody IS a Linux-user) but anyway, then 2 million is a very big deal.

Is there already DOS 3.1 starter edition?

More seriously, MS has screwed up big time in South America. Please take a look at the short article about El-Salvador at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/38606/index.html if you're curious what I mean (it's in the second half of the article, see the letter), people are sent to prison if they use pirated windows versions, as I understand. Microsoft has a great part in this new anti-piracy law, I think. Brazil (and Peru, and several other countries 'over there') aren't stupid. They are hearing this. They know of the immorality of Microsoft. So they want to ditch MS. No matter what Uncle Bill says. Concluding, imprisoning poor guys in South-America for piracy will backfire, people are going to hate Uncle Bill (and probably more of USA) and will be glad to never pay money to MS again.
sbergman27

Jul 02, 2005
7:17 AM EDT 		Well, arguably the two most powerful forces boosting the use of F/LOSS software are Microsoft and the BSA. The more serious they get about combatting that scourge of the industry, "software piracy", the better I feel.

The DOJ case aside, market forces *do* eventually act to tame abusive monopolists, though the time frame can seem positively glacial.

Piracy and preinstallations have given the public the impression that Windows is free, delaying the action of normal market forces. Now that MS is in that phase that every monopoly eventually enters, in which the only way to grow is to squeeze more money out of existing customers (whatever it takes), and now that hardware is getting cheap enough that Jane and Joe Consumer can actually see the "Windows" line item on the bill, the glaciers are on the horizon. It won't happen overnight. But I see a long cold winter ahead for Microsoft.

Funny thing, though. I imagine that 20 years from now we'll be saying things like "who'd have thought 20 years ago that Microsoft would become such a good corporate citizen?", kind of like we do now about IBM. Of course, by then, we'll have a whole new set of villains to combat.

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