Shamelessly stolen from The Register ( http://www.theregus.com ):

http://www.theregus.com/content/39/25255.html

Microsoft's Mac Hebrew snub prompts Israeli AntiTrust complaint
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 06/17/2002 at 02:21 EST

Microsoft's refusal to provide Hebrew support in its Macintosh Internet
Explorer browser or Office suite has prompted a complaint to Israel's
antitrust department. 

It's a fascinating story which raises as many cultural questions as does it
does political - all the more so, as we discovered last week, since neither
Apple nor Microsoft want to confront the issue. 

Hebrew writers have long complained that Microsoft Office for the Mac doesn't
support the script: even though it's drawn from the Windows codebase which
does support Hebrew, and many other right-to-left scripts to boot. The lack
of support wasn't fixed in Office 2001:mac, and despite rich language support
for developers in Apple's Mac OS X, Microsoft says it has no plans to add
Hebrew to Office v.X:mac. 

Even though it wouldn't cost Microsoft a cent, says Dov Cohen, a law student
who formed the National Academic Macintosh Administrators group to lobby for
Hebrew support in Microsoft products. 

Cohen says that the CEO of Apple's Israeli representative Yeda offered to
underwrite the localization work, pay 1million shekels, and assure a pre-order
of 2,000 copies from Apple France - but Microsoft Israel declined. (Yeda and
Apple France didn't return our request for confirmation). 

"What's the problem?" asks Cohen. "Microsoft Israel tried giving numerous
excuses, such as it being unprofitable, or that they lack the knowledge. But
that can't be it, since it's not going to cost them a nickle, and Yeda will
hire Macintosh Developers for them that'll do the job - so what's the catch
?" 

"Can anyone explain why IE:mac and Outlook Express:mac support Zulu and
Portugeuse but not Russian or Hebrew?" 

Or incredibly, Arabic and Korean too. 

This represents a serious barrier to consumer adoption of the Macintosh in
Israel, argues Cohen, who composed a ten-page letter to complaint to Israel's
antitrust department which was signed by hundreds of academics. He's still
waiting for a reply. 

In the US Antitrust case, the appeals case upheld the finding that Microsoft
was found guilty of abusing its monopoly power by tying further development
of Office for the Macintosh to Apple's adoption of Internet Explorer as the
default Mac browser. 

Under Israeli antitrust law, Cohen points out, violations are considered
criminal felonies, and apply to any company with 50 per cent market share.
Tying is illegal, as is unreasonably refusing a service. 

 
The US has this agreement with Israel on antitrust issues:
http://www.usis-israel.org.il/publish/press/justice/archive/1999/march/jd13
16.htm

We couldn't get through to a member of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit,
with The Beast's PR Waggener Edstrom doing its job of denying access. A
Wagg-Ed rep said that if there was a business case for it, there'd be a Hebrew
version of Mac Office. And she helpfully pointed out the Korean example
unprompted. 

We'd love to know what Microsoft's MBU really thinks of the situation - from
our experience, these guys do care about what they do, although it's
frequently a thankless task. And from experience too, we know that Microsoft
staff are as frustrated at being obscured behind Wagg-Ed's iron skirt as we
are here on the outside. 

" If there is a good reason they will go and develop a good version," said
Wagg-Ed. 

Had there been a communications breakdown? 

"I don't know if that's the case." 

We asked Apple Cupertino if they were pushing for better localization in
Microsoft products, but they referred us back to Microsoft, and declined to
comment. 

So there we have it. 

It's a reminder of how much market power a monopolist holds in shaping a
culture. Microsoft's Hebrew support in Windows is considered excellent - and
there's no question that they'd be endangering the cultural heritage by
refusing to support Hebrew on the Mac. But it does ensure Hebrew writers buy
Windows. That's thing about globalization - every part of the world ends up
looking the same  or at least, using the same system software. 

One world, and one OS?  

32 responses total.

There is always Linux, which fully supports Hebrew. 

http://www.iglu.org.il/faq/cache/8.html

Yeah, but you can't get Microsoft Office for Linux, which is the big issue
here.  Windows itself supports Hebrew, as does the Macintosh.

There's always CrossOver Office. :)

KERMIT for DOS supports Russian and Hebrew (and anything else that you want
to put together a VGA screen font for).  Jim's text editor does the same.
Forget MS.

How strange.  I helped implement Hebrew support on a user interface for
a database in the 1980's, and that was on dumb terminals which needed
to be finessed to make the text flow and cursor move right-to-left.  It
just seems absurd that this is still an issue with modern systems.

Maybe Apple can borrow this technology from a Linux package and move
on from there.  The less stuff runs on Microsoft, IMHO, the better.

Well, to summarize the article:
Microsoft Office for Mac has (rather mysteriously) no support for Hebrew, even
though Windows, Macintosh, and Office for Windows all have Hebrew support.
Further, a third party even offered to fund putting the support in, but
Microsoft wouldn't accept it.

Bottom line is that Microsoft is probably witholding support as a way of
forcing Hebrew users to buy Windows.  

This response has been erased.

Linux works fine. 

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Works fine for me then, I guess. 

Re 9:  Linux still requires an intelligent operator.  That's probably why it
didn't work for you.

Re 7:  From the article:
"Microsoft says it has no plans to add Hebrew to Office v.X:mac"
So we're not just talking about OS9 here.

This response has been erased.

I use FreeBSD and Linux. I don't see a whole lot of difference between 
the two. 

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Use them to get on the Internet and do web-hosting with them. If I 
wanted to show off, i would show off my VMS box, which can kick the 
hell out of Linux and BSD. 

jamie, i've never said this to you, and i fi have it's been quite a while.

but

FUCK YOU

and i don't mean that in a bratty childish way. imagine i'm saying it in a
very calm voice, with a bit of a sarcastic chuckle and a gentle shaking of
the head.

i could really care less whether or not Office supports Hebrew, or even
English for that matter, since i'm weary of any program that has become so
mainstream and used by such morons that they usually can't even figure out
how to (or why it may be useful to) save their documents in a format that can
be viewed by non M$ people. i think it's just crappy software, that i have
used only when working on a project with windows morons. 

here's a solution. Israel and M$ get together and copyright the Hebrew
language, stick it in Office, and charge for the use of it. like an extra
special key you have to buy for $500.

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I do indeed use Linux in a production environment.  Well, at least one of my
customers does, anyway, using a nice big warehouse/inventory/picking/shipping
application I wrote for them a few years ago.  

Too bad Linux is (to hear Jamie spout off) too unreliable for production
environments.  I'm sure my customer would be suprised to hear about it.

This response has been erased.

Re #14: I agree that FreeBSD is probably a superior server OS, though Linux
is catching up.  FreeBSD is somewhat lacking as a desktop and laptop OS,
though.  There's little application support, security updates still have to
be applied by hand, package dependancy checking is rudimentary unless you
compile everything from scratch, and PCMCIA support is a cruel joke.

Re #19: Sorry to hear you've had so many problems with Linux.  I administer
three Linux systems in a small production environment and I've had pretty
much none of the problems you report.  In fact, I rarely touch the systems
except to install security patches.  One is an SMP machine simultaneously
encoding and serving four RealVideo streams.  Another is a file server
running Samba (which is admittedly a nasty hack of a program, but it's a
very functional hack, and runs better under Linux than under FreeBSD), and
the third is a development machine that hosts four programmers' X sessions
via VNC.  None of them have crashed on me in production use, though I had a
few problems with the file server until I ditched the lame kernel RedHat
supplied and compiled my own.  (The drivers for the hardware RAID were bad.)
In spite of a few rude shutdowns none have trashed their filesystems either,
though I would like to eventually migrate them to journaling fs's.  (A 130
gigabyte ext2fs partition takes a *long* time to fsck.)

All of those machines except the video server have uptimes of around 100
days, currently, which means they haven't rebooted since I rebooted them
intentionally to do kernel upgrades.  The video server was rebooted about 20
days ago to test some rc script changes.  (It's offsite, so I really didn't
want to find out the hard way that I'd overlooked something.)

Don't get me wrong; I like FreeBSD, and I think it's stupid that Linux gets
so much more attention than it does.  But Linux ain't bad.  Given the chance
to start from scratch, I might have gone with FreeBSD instead, but since a
Linux machine was already in place I figured it was best to keep things
somewhat standardized.

i actually would like to check out FreeBSD, but i use a mac, so it is not an
option for me. i use macos for design, not because i like the os but because
i have to for some job situations. if i were a 3d animator or an architect
i would probably use windows. if i did what you do i would probably not choose
linux, but the linux running on on my personal computer is working superbly.

jamie, you are the one who came in here bashing linux and praising FreeBSD
and while once you were more specific, you made valid points, your constant
troll-style way of exerting superiority is less than impressive.

  I was pretty sure there was a PowerPC port of FreeBSD but I could be wrong.
  You can definitely get either NetBSD or OpenBSD for just about any modern
  Mac hardware (i.e. anything from the past five years or so..)

actually you are right. it looks like ppc will be a support platform
for FreeBSD, just not yet, altough there is a list for it.

If you are having such problems with linux, then you probably don't 
have it configured correctly. I know relatively few people who report 
the problems that you are having if their machines are configured 
correctly. We have a saying in LinuxLand: RTFM. It really does help. 

This response has been erased.

Read The Fine Manual. 

This response has been erased.

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I just find it funny that you are one of the few people who seems to have
problems using it. Linux is about as broken as any other operating system.
I have never had my box crash on me. If I can do it, why do you find it so
difficult? 

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Database server and file serving, among other things. And yes, I used AIX,
MVS and OpenBSD as well. MVS beats all of them, but I don't see much of a
difference between the others. 

Well, Linux certainly has issues, and Jamie certainly likes to find new 
ways to say "all the rest of you guys are stupid and I'm smart".  
Insulting Windows lacks shock value these days, so panning Linux in 
preference for, oh, Plan Nine or something is then next coming thing.

As other people have said, Linux is probably the best Unix for desktop 
use.  That's what I use my computer for, so I run Linux.  I wouldn't 
choose it for a server either.  It wasn't even considered for the next 
Grex OS.  Linux isn't completely unusable as a server, but FreeBSD is 
definately better, and I think 90% of the people who know anything 
about servers would agree.

And do you know, even if another open source system appeared with a 
better desktop environment, I'd probably keep running Linux.  I'm 
basically too busy *using* my computer to keep dicking around with 
different OS's every week.  I don't need the best OS, just an adequate 
one.

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