Erwin Tenhumberg talks about what New Zealand can do with the $100 million it will save over ten years since its schools have partially abandoned Microsoft Office.

He’s referring to a post by fellow Sun employee Ken Drachnik, titled New Zealand Rejects Microsoft Office for 25,000 Macs! Drachnik writes, “Today, New Zealand Herald reports that the government of New Zealand rejected the bid from Microsoft to upgrade 25,000 Macs in their education system to the next version of Microsoft Office. Supposedly, the government couldn’t justify the cost of $100 Million over ten years (yes Dr. Evil, that is 100 MILLION) for the Macs! Bully for New Zealand. Go download NeoOffice for free now and upgrade to the OpenOffice.org version for the Mac when it is released in December of this year! Save the taxpayers $100 million and spend it on more books, better hospitals, education for more open source programmers.”

The original article in the Herald seems to take a negative slant on the news, despite the outrageous demands Microsoft made–that New Zealand schools pay for licenses of MS Office they don’t even have!

“Education Minister Steve Maharey said Microsoft insisted the Government pay a licence fee for all Apple Macintoshes in schools to use Microsoft Office.

“But the programs were used on only half the machines.

“The ministry could not justify the extra $2.7 million being given to Microsoft for software that would not be used,” said Mr Maharey.

“He said Apple supplied a program similar to Microsoft Office, and NeoOffice, an open-source program developed by volunteers, was also available.”

Microsoft has long been double-dipping; charging customers for products they don’t use or even own, or charging them twice for the same program. For example, many schools and corporations have site licenses for Windows, so they have paid for each copy of Windows they run. However, each time they buy a new computer with Windows pre-installed, they’re paying separately, and again, for that copy of Windows!

With this in mind, it’s clear that Microsoft’s income is skewed and its marketshare is also probably overcounted. Not to mention that schools and corporations are paying twice for the products they purchase! What a ripoff.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 10:06 am and is filed under Open Source, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.