Microsoft Pushes Windows To Battle Linux In Africa 248
ThousandStars writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft has been making a concerted effort to promote Windows in Africa, pushing Windows over Linux in very poor countries that haven't been locked into a single operating system. From the article: 'To that end, it has established a presence in 13 countries, donated Windows for thousands of school computers, and funded programs for entrepreneurs and the young. It also has used aggressive business tactics, some aimed at its biggest threat in the region: Linux ...'"
Re:The Microsoft ads did say they were PCs... (Score:5, Interesting)
Mandriva in Nigeria (Score:5, Interesting)
Later on, the article covers the Mandriva / Microsoft in Nigeria battle that was covered here before:
"TSC approached Mandriva SA, a French company that sells a Linux version. Believing Microsoft had offered its $3 package, Mandriva proposed a $3 price for a Linux operating system, plus about $2 for other software, say people familiar with the situation. In August 2007, TSC issued a purchase order for Mandriva Linux, and the laptop's Taiwanese manufacturer began loading it.
Microsoft continued to push Windows. It offered its XP and Office software for about $45 per machine, says Nyimbi Odero, then TSC's chief executive.
Mr. Odero says Microsoft wanted TSC to delete Linux from the initial shipments of Classmates. He says Microsoft proposed a way to "make it worth your while" through a joint-marketing agreement. According to a draft agreement Microsoft sent to TSC last Sept. 13, Microsoft would pay TSC to fund "certain marketing activities to encourage the sale and distribution" of Microsoft products. Mr. Odero says Microsoft made it clear that TSC wouldn't really be expected to market the products, but could keep the money as an incentive to replace Linux with Windows."
(for anyone who doesn't know, I work for Mandriva).
Re:Dear poor schools..... (Score:5, Interesting)
What is it with people like you? Have you been there? no!
The reason for poverty is not lack of resources, it is lack of a legal structure that delivers contract enforcement. This means that it is impossible to ahve organisations bigger than a small family with any degree of confidence, except by the use of force.
This is a cultural problem. (Helped immensely by the spread of Christianity and democracy).
Computers are immensely powerful in the 3rd world becausee the enable family-sized organisations to do massively bigger projects.
Re: p00r Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Well in this case, Africa might be just one of those places. I mean ,what is MS going to do? Give away Windows licenses for free, and throw in Vista-capable PC's as well? (sorry, didn't read the TFA).
What is MS going to do? Bribe high-ranking government officials, that's what. Sorry to say this, but I think MS is going to have a very easy time in most african countries, to have Linux replaced by MS in all schools and government institutions.
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Interesting)
but they are now willing to pay millions going after a market so poor they have little to no computer infrastructure. THAT is somewhat new to them. Typically, the left these markets alone and dumped billions into marketing to markets where there was a support system and more of a chance of an ROI out 5 years but probably under 10 years.
Sub-Saharan Africa? They're probably looking out 20+ years if even that. But mostly, I think what they are doing is blocking as many public successes of GNU/Linux in these areas. Did you notice how quick they got on the anti-OLPC marketing campaign? They dumped $25 million into Egypt alone so that they'd be a Windows-only government and there are dozens more around the world.
So this is somewhat new for them and it's probably costing them something close to $1 billion annually in these marketing/services/training/etc "partnerships". All to keep GNU/Linux from finding a home in a hut or two in areas like sub-Saharan Africa. IMO
LoB
Re:WSJ gets it wrong again (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm. I use both Powershell and bash, and Powershell is rather good ; easier to use than bash in many respects.
It does have it's downfalls ; because it's primary design is to pass objects and not bytestreams down the pipeline, getting the output formatted exactly how you want it can end up with you writing a little more code than you wanted, if you have strict format requirements.
While *nix does have shells that can use objects (because they are Python flavoured), it doesn't have anything quite like Powershell. IMHO the syntax is easier to grok than bash, and you don't have to learn at least one text-processing language (sed, grep, awk) to make it useful[1][2], because the data you want is most often accessible as a property.
I find *nix to be a far more flexible and powerful operating system than Windows, it beats it on plenty of criteria, but Powershell is not one of them.
[1] although regular expressions are useful to learn, as they are for most shells. .NET programmers in particular can leverage their existing knowledge of the .NET APIs
[2]
Re:For all the slamming of M$ (Score:5, Interesting)
I have yet to see Linux platform DELIVER ANYTHING the entire world wants to use, in an easy to manage, easy to interact with format. I tried installing redhat a few times back in the 90s and after banging my head a few times to actually get it working I thought to myself "Oh. Sweet. Free Civ and data management I DONT NEED."
The 90s? That is relevant how? It is about as useful as my telling you that Mandriva 2009 is much better than Windows 3.1. What is relevant is how current Linux versions compare to current Windows versions.
There is a lot of software for Linux, and obtainning and installing it is much easier and faster than for Windows.
I guess what Im really saying is, most Linux/open source advocates do it for the rebellion not because they have a better product to promote
Wrong. Most Linux users use it because they think it is better. Those who want to use open source have good motives to do so (avoiding lock in, auditable security). The biggest advantages of Linux are that it is easy, and that it is flexible. All your software is managed an upgraded using a single GUI interface, some distros can even do major version upgrade with a few mouse clicks - try upgrading from XP to Vista that way!
As for the flexibility you can get distros for geeks (Gentoo, Slack, Arch), normal users desktops (Ubuntu, Mandriva, SuSe), servers (Debian, Red Hat), old hardware (Puppy, Damn Small Linux).
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Microsoft ads did say they were PCs... (Score:4, Interesting)
Looking at some Microsoft dlls you can see they're signed by Thawt which is the company Mark Shuttleworth sold for millions, so in a round-a-bout kind of way Microsoft funded the ability for Mark to start Ubuntu which is now competing with Microsoft in Africa. Woops.
Re:Dear poor schools..... (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh dear!
Another one that thinks e everyone outside the US border is a "Mexican" that rides in mules and lives in mud huts; and that in Africa all you find is illiterate, half naked aborigines that can be dazzled with a mirror and bought with plastic beads.
There are cities in Africa, did you know that? Yes, that's right, cities with buildings made of steel and glass, with paved roads and cars rolling on them.
And there are a lot of intelligent people in Africa, who run big business and companies. Hey! Even a maker of a Linux distro is African! Can you imagine that? No? Have you heard of Ubuntu?
Yes, there are many extremely poor zones in Africa too, where people live in infra-human conditions and can't even read and write. But those areas are not the one getting computers and Windows. Do you think Microsoft really wants to "help with the education of African children"? MS is pushing Windows on urban schools where Linux is a reality, because there is where their target "market" is.
So yes, maybe the schools could sell the Windows licenses on e-bay, but then they could use the money to buy, I don't know, maybe MORE COMPUTERS? They don't really need the money to buy toilet paper and hire instructors to teach the children how to use it. Your post may be well meaning, but it's insulting.
Now, the parent is modded insightful, and I'm sure I'll be modded troll, but I don't care. I needed to get this out.
Re:For all the slamming of M$ (Score:3, Interesting)
In the event you are actually ignorant and not just trying to pick a fight, I can assure you that as someone who hasn't run Windows in several years, and does most of his computing on Linux (along with OS X on a laptop), I am not doing so out of any sense of "rebellion", although I don't see anything wrong with that mindset under certain circumstances.
If your primary reason for using a computer is to play games, you certainly should just stay with Windows. If I wanted to play games I think I'd rather have one of those thing you hook up to your TV.
I used to support Windows users for a living, and before that OS/2 users and before than DOS users and before that mainframe users.
I used to be quite a fan of Windows because it ran on several hardware platforms, was fairly fast, had a reasonable feature set. Interestingly enough, Linux does all that now, and Windows does not. So you see it is Windows (or Microsoft) that rebelled against me when they decided only to support Intel boxes, allowed the code to get bloated, buggy and slow. If you like being forced to buy a new computer every few years just to get the OS to boot in a reasonable amount of time, then by all means go ahead and do that. Not only are you having to pay, in most cases, full price to get the latest version of Windows (over the years MS hasn't been able to make up its mind regarding upgrade-only versions of Windows, but as I understand it these days it's better to go with the full release) but you are also required usually to get a whole new computer as your old one is maxed out on memory that is no longer easily available etc. Again, for gaming, having the fastest processor, and the mos memory, fastest bus, etc. are all important for running the game, regardless of your OS. For ordinary web browsing, light office work, photo-shop type stuff, my vintage 2000 machine does quite well. In fact, when Windows users see me on it they ask how I got it to be so fast. I am quite sure that if I tried to run Windows on this machine it would be a very frustrating experience.
Also, I'm not running Linux because it is "free". I purchased my first few versions of Linux in the form of Red Hat and Suse. Eventually found I liked Debian better (even purely for desktop use) and so I settled on it. Of course it's nice not to have to pay for your OS, but even if each major release of Debian cost as much as Windows I'd still be coming out way ahead both in terms of the hardware I'd need to run it and in terms of time wasted on virus scanning, defragging, cleaning my registry and of course mandatory upgrades. Of course if you are paying $3 for it in Africa, maybe you don't mind all the overhead. I'm sure those people paying $3 are getting full telephone support from Microsoft for that too.
Linux is the water of operating systems (Score:2, Interesting)
Linux can, in this regard, never win. Have you ever seen water winning? As a businessman, I can always prey on the naivety of the uneducated, and make them believe that my bottled water is better than what comes out of their tap - and in some cases that may surely be the case.
Still, Linux will survive every operating system that exists and will exist in the marketplace. On the one hand you have labels and trademars. On the other hand you have a free platform that is always there if none of the other options seem to be feasible.
As long as there is a need for operating systems, its development may stagnate, but it will never end. Linux may change shape, name and direction, but it is impossible to defeat, just as it is impossible to destroy water.
So, please, do not worry too much about what these silly businessmen are doing. Persistence, attention, openness and honesty are key to success here. Microsoft may have a few more years, we have centuries.
Re:Wait... (Score:2, Interesting)
but they are now willing to pay millions going after a market so poor they have little to no computer infrastructure. THAT is somewhat new to them. Typically, the left these markets alone and dumped billions into marketing to markets where there was a support system and more of a chance of an ROI out 5 years but probably under 10 years.
Sub-Saharan Africa? They're probably looking out 20+ years if even that. But mostly, I think what they are doing is blocking as many public successes of GNU/Linux in these areas. Did you notice how quick they got on the anti-OLPC marketing campaign? They dumped $25 million into Egypt alone so that they'd be a Windows-only government and there are dozens more around the world.
So this is somewhat new for them and it's probably costing them something close to $1 billion annually in these marketing/services/training/etc "partnerships". All to keep GNU/Linux from finding a home in a hut or two in areas like sub-Saharan Africa. IMO
LoB
You have completely missed the idea.
When I pitched this to MS's director of security at a conference I told him that MS has to do it and why.
It is not about making making money from places with no money. That would be foolish. If you want to do that you can give Windows OSs to elephant seals, they also have no money.
It is about making sure that places without money are rich locations for remote labor. Having no money makes you very cheap.
The thing is that if all these people learn is Linux how do you outsource Windows support to them? Now if you have them learning Windows from childhood then you can outsource to them just fine.
This keeps support for MS operating systems cheap long into the future. This is a sales point for the OS when selling it to people who do have money. Remember India is already out sourcing. This is just prepping a new remote labor location for 10-20 years from now. It is called thinking ahead.
American jobs? Bah, as consoles become more popular we will be less qualified for our jobs then the people who have no money. Besides it is about profit not patriotic job preservation.
Yeah, I think Anon is the way to go with this post. Less death threats that way.
Yes, Darth Vader was my child hood hero.
MicroNestle (Score:1, Interesting)
Kinda reminds me of the story of Nestle giving free samples of baby formula in poor 3rd world countries ("it's much more modern, scientific and better for your child than breast milk"), and once the mothers' breast milk dried up, they couldn't necessarily afford the expensive formula, resulting in starving children.
Microsoft, you baby-killers!