Comment by crdoconnor
9 years ago
>But a quite decent improvement from the era when the company bribed government officials to purchase bulk licences for pupils and govn't, distorting the job market
IIRC they're still doing that. In India I think?
>This is a less harmful Microsoft than it was 5-10-20 years ago.
The key to that is Microsoft being far less powerful than it was 5-10 years ago. Where MS can throw it's weight around, it still does.
The aftermath of the DOJ case is probably as much as responsible for that as the competition which ended up marginalizing them.
> IIRC they're still doing that. In India I think?
They still do this in France and they are being sued for this. Actually this is in today's French headlines.
>>But a quite decent improvement from the era when the company bribed government officials to purchase bulk licences for pupils and govn't, distorting the job market > IIRC they're still doing that. In India I think?
I wasn't aware of this. At least the IT textbooks in my home country write about “text processor” and “spreadsheet tool” and not explicitly MS Word or Excel. The programming classes don't require MS Visual Studio project files to be submitted either.
In 2008 Hungary paid $162M for the “Clean Software Programme” for 3 years. In 2011 it became $54M for an other 3 years, in 2014 it was reduced to $2.8M. I don't hear stories any more about their legal bullying team called BSA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_(The_Software_Alliance) which with members of the local police they appeared time to time at business offices asking the for proof of purchase. Even they had no search warrant, they used a psychological terror with the presence of the police to threaten the businesses.
This is one of their ads from the past http://img.index.hu/cikkepek/0101/tech/bsaplakat2.jpg It says: “Don't use illegal software! _Users_ of illegal software can sentenced to 2-5 years. _Have you been inspected today?_