Microsoft Plays the Open Source Software Game
Apr 13, 2010, 18:02 (1 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Paul Rubens)
"Microsoft has been busy these past few days reminding the world
that it really is an organization of monstrous proportions and its
tendrils reach from the humblest consumer desktop right up to the
level of super-computing. Its message is clear: The company has no
intention of giving up any of the markets in which it competes to
open source operating systems like Linux -- at least not without
the mother of all fights.
"Perhaps provoked by Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth's
pronouncement that "we want to put Ubuntu and free software on
every single consumer PC that ships from a major manufacturer, the
ultimate maverick move," Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) saw fit to shed
some new light on Office Starter 2010, Ina Fried, over at CNet,
reports. This free edition of its Office software -- which will not
include PowerPoint but will have crippled versions of Excel and
Word -- will be given away with consumer machines in an effort to
poison the well for competing open source productivity suites like
OpenOffice (which includes a PowerPoint-compatible presentation
application and full-featured spreadsheet and word processing
programs.)
"Microsoft appears to have woken up to the fact that free
open-source Office clones like OpenOffice may prove to be the thin
end of a very slippery wedge, and if users discover they can get by
with it instead of paying for a full version of Microsoft's Office,
then the next step will be to switch to Ubuntu (or some other
Linux) instead of paying for Windows."
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