Michael Dolan Dot Com

Monday, June 26th, 2006

Microsoft Fights ODF with… Free Office for Everyone… errr… just Massachusetts

It appears stopping ODF is worth at least $30M to Microsoft. Actually it’s far less b/c well.. another copy of Office costs Microsoft nothing - it’s just “lost opportunity”…

But this is relatively unfair - so MA goes towards ODF - and gets free software for its students… why don’t the other states get free software for their students? Will Microsoft replicate this tactics in other ODF states that may pop up? It would seem to me as governor you could save your state $30M in Office fees by supporting ODF. And if you don’t support ODF, you’re wasting $30M of your taxpayers dollars and are evil :)

So the real coup might be if Microsoft gets to write off any of that $30M… then the trick is really on taxpayers everywhere… and those poor students who will grow up only knowing Office and not the apps built on open standards and open source that all companies and governments will be using in less than 5 years…. (or 3 years ago if you believed Jonathan) .. ha… it _will_ take time… how much I don’t know.

It would be so ironic if MA mandated that it’s classrooms use Macs…