Summary: Microsoft sets off its $80,000,000 marketing campaign for Office 2010, spearheaded by analysts whom Microsoft is paying a lot of money through lucrative contracts

MICROSOFT'S latest version of its biggest (but ever-shrinking) cash cow is out, so Microsoft's "perception management" [1, 2] kicks off, led by Microsoft marketers (masquerading as "analysts") such as Forrester. This latest promotional fluff reminds us a great deal of the anti-Google Apps/Docs 'studies' from former Microsoft employees (also masquerading as independent "consultants"/"analysts") because they deliver exactly the same talking points which are incorrect. As SJVN puts it:

Am I the only who finds Forrester analyst JP Gowdner's blog proclamation that "Office 2010, Microsoft's latest release, will continue to succeed with consumers" and "In terms of usage and penetration, Google Docs remains a failure" on the eve of Office 2010's arrival to retails stores be a little ... suspicious? Could it have anything to do with Microsoft having just launched n $80 million Office 2010 ad campaign?

Notice how they leave out OpenOffice.org. There are many examples just like this and it's probably deliberate (distraction from the real competition). Neither Google nor Microsoft is the decent option here; both are proprietary. One ought to promote Abiword, KOffice, OpenOffice.org, and so forth. This omission of OpenOffice.org is a subject that has been brought up with examples in the IRC channel, especially in recent weeks. Microsoft knows that it would be promotional to mention its #1 competition, which it hires special staff to counter/suppress. It's more convenient for Microsoft to pretend that it's only competing against Google (one big brand against another).

Pogson explains "why schools should not use Microsoft Office" and Linux Pro Magazine drops some OpenOffice.org numbers:

Use GNU/Linux, a cooperative product of the world which works for you, not against you.

 

Popular open source productivity a154 million downloads since version 3.0

This number does not include tens of millions of GNU/Linux downloads that contain OpenOffice.org.

According to this new report from OSOR, a Danish ministry "leaves out open source savings in report on Police budget" (we alluded to this last week).

In a report requested by the parliament on the Police budget, the Danish ministry of Finance has left out recommendations by its consultants to switch to open source, which would result in savings of a 100 million kroner (about 13 million Euro), Danish newspapers report.

The omission was found by the Danish Association for Open Source Service suppliers (OSL), which compared the report sent to parliament with the original report by McKinsey, a consultancy. They recommend switching from the proprietary office system and relational database management system to open source alternatives OpenOffice and MySQL.

For an idea of what goes on in Denmark, see this post. Microsoft plays dirty. ⬆

Update: Microsoft is now using its partners from comScore [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11] to spread lies about the market share of Office for gullible journalists to repeat those lies in print.