Notso Excellent!
Indian OpenOffice rollout picks up pace – ZDNet UK Correspondent Greg Allen spotted this story with an interesting take: “Microsoft has aggressively invested in India and Bill Gates himself has taken an active personal interest in that country. So why is the Indian government officially developing a competing free product to Microsoft Office?
Will Gates mention this the next time is Indian government asks him to drop a few hundred million dollars on some big outsourcing facility in Bangalore or Hyderabad?”
Open source groups are helping the Indian government meet its target of creating open source CDs in all official Indian languages by February 2006.
The open source applications included on the CDs, such as the Firefox browser and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, have already been translated into five Indian languages — Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Punjabi and Urdu. But there are still 17 languages left to be translated in just three months.
Indeed this cannot be good news for Gates and company.
Are all those languages available in Microsoft’s products?
How long would they have to wait until they are all available?
The ones they name are , though at the price points for M$ Office, Open Office is a steal, maybe they can apply for a Romanian five finger discount.
Do you think this may have prompted M$oft’s announcement this weekend of the projected building of the first MSN R&D facility outside the US — in Shanghai?
Microsoft products exist in all languages that has some form of government/country behind it. Not just Office, but also XP.
A funny Microsoft story, http://tinyurl.com/223zjs, Chilean Mapuches in language row with Microsoft.
Mapuche Indians in Chile are trying to take global software giant Microsoft to court in a legal battle which raises the question of whether anyone can ever “own” the language they speak.
LOVE THAT GRAPHIC!
2: OpenOffice is freeware. No charge, nada. That’s why India is distributing it. Same with Firefox.
I’ve been using Open Office for three years, and it’s very compatible with many other document formats, including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The Open Office database is not compatible with MS Access, however. I haven’t tried the math symbols package yet, or the drawing program.
Open Office is for 99% of users – a perfect replacement. I love it, and recommend it to people if they don’t have Office 2000 or later.
I’ve used Open Office for at least a couple of years now. There are a couple of things I would like to see improved, but there isn’t ONE thing I can do in MS Office that I can’t do in OO.