Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program

Even being a Linux fan boy, I still hate OpenOffice/Libre because it's so clunky and doesn't play as nice as MS Office when you need to do some complicated things for the workplace. I actually even prefer Google docs now over OpenOffice and find the gmail/Drive integration so handy. As for the Greece thing, MS has a good product (Office), but a bad OS (for the money they charge). They need to approach this differently, like porting Office to Linux.

MS is not a newcomer to pushing their solutions to schools through government channels. It's their way to prevent people from learning about alternatives. Corruption is all around in these schemes.

What a load of crap. Grow up people. Microsoft Office is worth every single cent.

Hmm, there's a mixture of interesting and fairly mundane stuff in here. On the mundane side: one of the points is that Microsoft objects to the requirement to procure the lowest-price software that meets the specs, because there is FOSS that meets many of the specs (as written) and it's no-cost, therefore no commercial supplier can possibly compete. That's an argument you'd expect any commercial software supplier to make, and in fact they do make that argument pretty much anywhere those kinds of procurement rules come up. Whether making that argument is trying to fleece the government or not probably depends on whether you agree with commercial software providers' arguments about benefits of their software vs. FOSS, e.g. in functionality and/or total cost of ownership.

I think the relative merits of Microsoft Office vs. other solutions is something that's been hashed out many, many times. But I do find interesting the request on Microsoft's part for a face-to-face meeting. They don't specifically <i>say</i> a "private" face-to-face meeting, but that seems implied.<p>Presumably if they want to give discounts or special deals they don't want to do it publicly where everybody (including competitors and future potential customers) can see, but I wonder if this sort of tactic is something that's even tenable going forward? With so many of these contracts coming into the open, will they be able to continue giving discounts on a customer-by-customer basis?