I notice that MS has changed Works significantly, I suspect because the old Works (word processing, spreadsheet, flat file database and Outlook Express) suited the needs of too many people and was denting Office sales. When I went to the MS site, all the links from the Works home page were dead, which tells you how much they're supporting it.
Now, MS, who's biggest problem with Office is program bloat, is having trouble convincing people to move up. Sending out free copies makes sense to me, though, and try as I might, I can't twist it into an evil MS plot.
Richard Kimball wrote:Well, there's two separate issues here. The article is specifically about giving free copies to government employees and officials. Sending gifts to government employees and officials with a retail value of around $500 is generally against the law. It's especially against the law if the sender of the gift either does business with or is regulated by the government agency involved. So, it might not be an "evil MS plot," but it's definitely an illegal act.
Sending out free copies makes sense to me, though, and try as I might, I can't twist it into an evil MS plot.
The second issue has more to do with how organizations work. Let's say you are a department manager at XYZ Corporation. Your company uses Microsoft products, and the current "standard" is to use Office 2000. Microsoft has made a presentation to your IT department to try to sell them on a Office 2003 upgrade, but the IT folks have decided for various reasons that they will not buy the upgrade. They have settled into a 3 year cycle for replacing desktop PC's, and next year is the time they will be replacing all desktops and the software on them. This year, they are doing major upgrades to the network servers, and the budget is strictly for "maintenance only" on the desktops. Next year, new desktops will be purchased, and the organization will move from Windows 2000 to whatever the latest OS is from Microsoft, and from Office 2000 to the latest version of Office. But this year they are concentrating on servers and infrastructure upgrades.
But you signed up to possibly win a free X-Box at a Microsoft booth at a trade show a few months back, so Microsoft has your contact inforamtion at XYZ Corporation. So, they send you 3 "free" copies of Office 2003. You install one copy on your PC, one on your secretary's PC, and one on your research assistant's PC. You're pretty computer savvy, so you did this yourself, without calling the IT department about it. All is good, right?
Except that you are now saving documents on the company's servers in a format that can't be read by other users using the company's "standard" applications. When someone else tries to read a document you saved, they get a message telling them that they must upgrade to Office 2003 in order to read your document. The same thing happens when you email Word documents or Excel spreadsheets to co-workers in other departments.
Pretty soon, Microsoft sends a few more "free" copies to some other people at your company, and there's a full scale rebellion going on in your company. End users with the "free" software are putting pressure on the IT department to upgrade now. End users in other departments are complaining that they can't read and collaborate on documents they need to do their job.
This is one of the ways that Microsoft drives upgrade sales, and if you work at one of the "target" companies, it's a big PITA. It's hard on the IT department, but it's also hard on everyone else at the company that gets involved in this kind of project.
I can.
Microsoft sends software to Employee "A" who installs it on his computer at work without clearing it with IT, and who then takes it home to install there.
Microsoft waits several months, then shows up for a software licensing audit. They discover a copy of the software on Employee "A"'s machine for which the agency can't produce a license.
Microsoft demands that the agency, now clearly engaging in software piracy since they have software for which they can't produce a license, buy the software for all of the 10s of thousands of machines owned by the agency to avoid prosecution.
It's not exactly an "evil plot" but it isn't totally innocent either. The very employees at Microsoft who decided to do this probably cannot themselves accept a gift this size from a vendor... or a would-be vendor.
Almost every big company has policies like this. If you're in advertising or promotion you're supposed to know that you just don't do this. It puts the recipients in an embarrassing spot.
Microsoft's advertising people know this. They thought about it, and then they did it anyway. I think that tells us something about Microsoft that we would just as soon not know.