Houston Tells Microsoft To Shove Off

from the caught-with-their-computers-down dept

An in-depth article from USA Today looks at the story behind the city of Houston telling Microsoft goodbye in favor of a small Office-clone maker named SimDesk. Microsoft had been bullying Houston about upgrading to their "Software Assurance" scheme, where they force you to upgrade regularly - or force you to pay full price later. Through a chance meeting on an airplane, the city's CIO found out about SimDesk, and decided it was worth checking out. After experimenting in local libraries, they decided to move many city computers over to SimDesk. Microsoft hadn't been paying attention, and suddenly freaked out, threatening all sorts of actions. Eventually, they even came forward with accusations that Houston was using some of their software without licenses. The city checked it out, and, instead often found that they had paid for too many licenses. Of course, through the whole story, I kept wondering why they bothered paying $5 million for this other Office suite, when they could have gone with OpenOffice for free.

2 Comments | Leave a Comment..


If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...
 

Reader Comments (rss)

(Flattened / Threaded)

  1.  

    No Subject Given

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Jan 22nd, 2003 @ 7:07am

    'free' still scares way too many people, especially vanilla users like city and town clerks. I'm sure the 5 million has implied support of upgrades and phone support of some kind.

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    simdesk free 90 day trial

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Mar 14th, 2003 @ 6:21pm

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


Add Your Comment

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Save me a cookie
  • Note: A CRLF will be replaced by a break tag (<br>), all other allowable HTML will remain intact
  • Allowed HTML Tags: <b> <i> <a> <em> <br> <strong> <blockquote> <hr> <tt>


A word from our Sponsors...
Follow Techdirt
Flattr rss rss
From the Techdirt Archive...
A word from our Sponsors...

Close

Email This