MS Office on Linux 14813

billwg poked his little head through the XP firewall and said:

Sorry, you are not to be believed on this one.

And, of course, that is mostly wrong. Take Word, for example. Grossly inferior to WordPerfect at first, Microsoft would visit business and practically yell at them for using WordPerfect. Microsoft would cut prices to the bone to, as Steve Ballmer puts it nowadays, "Get the business! Get the business! Get the business!". They pulled this same trick with NT, lying through their teeth about having the UNIX person, and getting some leverage through drastically lower prices.

Admirably enough, they eventually made good on some of their promises, in the meantime knifing superior products.

Another method they would use was to buy up business as an easy way to get the foot in the door. That's how they acquired the browser from SpyGlbutt. As usual, Bill Gates came up with an innocuous term that ended up killing SpyGlbutt -- we will pay you a certain percentage of our IE sales. So they gave IE away for free, also greatly hurting NetScape at the same time.

And if they don't, just let them try to find something else. Even now, the only other alternatives are free software.

We're seeing that scenario partly play out.

-- When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is Microsoft software, everything looks like Windows.