The British Conservative Party Commits to Open Source and Microsoft Responds Saying it Gives you Choice!
This week BBC Radio had a feature where the Conservative Party promised to create a level playing field for open source software in the UK in an attempt to save taxpayers more than £600m ($1.15bn) a year. George Osborne, told the Royal Society of Arts “There isn’t a level playing field for open source software. As it stands, too many companies are frozen out of government IT contracts, stifling competition and driving up costs. He also announced that Mark Thompson has been advised on how to make Britain the open source leader in Europe.
The current labour government has come in for criticism for failing to promote open software, most recently in the education sectors where the British Education Communications and Technology Agency extended and agreement with Microsoft despite concerns over the software giant’s licensing and research indicating schools could save money by using open source alternatives.
As Steve Ballmer said in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”
John Newton in his blog commented, “Being a British software company, you would think that the UK government would be all over Alfresco as an open source alternative to American software. After all, governments all over Europe are adopting Alfresco for document management, records management and starting to develop web sites. Local and Central governments in France and Spain have been using Alfresco for nearly two years now.”
In this radio feature Microsoft were invited to respond. What was amazing was their comment that Microsoft gave customers “choice”
So when you choose SharePoint where is the choice around:
- Operating System
- Database
- Application Server
- Java or .NET
- Content Management System
- Portal
- Blog Software
- Wiki
In a book entitled ” the Marketing Playbook” ex Microsoft marketing executives talk of Microsoft strategies and tactics and this is a classic platform expansion play (from Office) as opposed to a “choice” strategy. So this is how they kill the “cancer” with “Choice”!
More on the marketing plays next week