Microsoft uses controversial publication to promote Office 365

The giant from Redmond must be desperate since it has to use a controversial story from a relatively small Italian city to combat open source software, as in the mean time many larger deployments also in Italy are happy with LibreOffice and the numbers produced by Provincia di Perugia prove the opposite of the Microsoft-publication.

Microsoft writes about the switch of the city of Pesaro from OpenOffice to Office 365. There are however many questions around the publication that should provide backing for the switch. Yet Microsoft uses that publication on it's website for promotion goals.
There are several facts that make the publication controversial. It mentions, for example, the sum of € 300.000 for migration and training costs and extra phone costs of € 85 a year without any data to back that. Sonia Motegiove, an Italian IT consultant, comments that an extensive training for 600 people would cost € 25.000 maximum.
The publication also claims that the interface would cause problems, but apparently the new 365 environment is not considered to cause users any problems.. When a lack of compatibility of OpenOffice is mentioned, Motegiove asks why Pesaro didn't choose for LibreOffice, with a much improved exchange of documents.
In another publication Italo Vignoli from LibreOffice-Italy points to the fact that Pesaro ignores facts such as the security issues that come with the use of Microsoft Office but in stead chooses wording to explain the migration that read as Microsoft propaganda.
All questions to the city of Pesaro or the project manager however, have remained unanswered.
Sources around Pesaro tell that the whole migration project was broken. First the involved IT company could not finish the project, and also half way there was a new IT-director with less focus on the project.

All this does not prevent Microsoft from using a 'study' to make false claims.
This situation looks similar to what happened with a Microsoft sponsored HP publication regarding the city of Munich, that works with Linux and LibreOffice. The HP publication 'proved' high costs in Munich coming with the open source solution. Yet the reality is that during the migration alone, 13 million was saved. That apart from the million or more license fees that ware saved every year since 2013. Savings that are partly spend to support the development of the open source software that Munich uses, and that also stimulate local/regional IT-firms.
Does these actions from Microsoft look so desperate because now also it's office-business faces serious competition?

Reacties

  1. Microsoft is good at defeating competition. In the 1980s they defeated Novell Netware which was actually inferior to LAN Manager. But Word Perfect was formidable. Novell bought WordPerfect to avenge and could not compete with MS. Then Corel bought WP. They knew Windows better than MS. Still, they got outnumbered by Office.

    MS gave Windows XP free to Britons. They silenced BBC with an 'understanding' agreement.

    The problem with OO and LO is that they focus on the Western societies ignoring billions in South Asia. Unicode versions of Indic are horrible and extremely hard to use. There is an alternative way through romanizing and smart fonts. If it gets support from the open source community, billions would be lifted off illiteracy because computers will help them type their languages looking at a key layout only slightly different to the English keyboard. Please read the following very short document to understand this.

    Please read this doc:
    http://ahangama.com/rs/test-odt.odt

    You can read the complex Indic using the following font:
    http://smartfonts.net/ttf/aruna.ttf

    If this issue can be fixed, we can make template fonts for all Indic languages and there will not be a use for Windows or MS Office any more in India.

    Please reply to jc@ahangama.com

    Thanks.

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  2. I was a little skeptical about using this service, but the price was right....I purchased the key from http://www.MicrosoftStoreinc.com , and within a couple of hours, they emailed it to me. It was valid!!

    For anybody who is concerned about whether they are a scam operation, they take PayPal. PayPal is known for customer protection, so if it doesn't work, I am confident that a refund would not be an issue.

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  3. Using my experience that i get working office key from site www.vanskeys.com. and after i used is works geat.

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  4. Oh, that's very interesting! Did you also know that anegis consulting is Microsoft's gold partner? They helped me get my Dynamics software and I couldn't be happier with their service.

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