State Dept Cable: Microsoft’s War With Vietnam

A cable labeled 04HOCHIMINHCITY367 Sensitive and For Official Use Only describes the 2004 efforts by Microsoft to convince US officials of the importance of pressuring the Vietnamese government to switch entirely to Windows as an operating system.

The cable, which was titled “IN VIETNAM, THE GOVERNMENT IS MICROSOFT’S FIRST TARGET,” features arguments from Microsoft that the government’s switch of some of its systems to Linux was de facto piracy because no one could possibly be happy with Linux and they’d all just switch back to a pirated version of Windows. Microsoft claimed to have data showing that the average Linux user goes back to pirated Windows in a few months.

Even the State Dept. found Microsoft’s arguments “self-serving” but seemed convinced by the claim that “there would be a massive compatibility problem — most of the world uses Windows, and the Government of Vietnam could find themselves in a position where it might be different to communicate and share data between their Linux systems and everyone else’s MS systems.”

Of course this was 2004 and the desktop situation was a little different back then, but Microsoft was still determined to see, with US government help, 100% Windows adoption in the Vietnamese government within 5 years.

Fast forward to 2009, Vietnam’s government orders every single government computer to switch to Linux.