According to Sunrise Iset’s Commercial Director Vyacheslav Kuznetsov, Microsoft is not going to lose its share of the market in any way.

‘Expecting that Microsoft can get hurt through competition with anybody is simply nonsensical, since the company has remained, and has always been, the monopolist on the market. Proportionally, there is no way Linux can affect the way Microsoft products sell, since their share of the market is very tiny. It may well be that people will actually stop using Windows some time in the future, but this surely won’t happen over the next few years,’ he says.

As for the recent promises to introduce Russian software in high schools, Mr. Kuznetsov believes there isn’t going to be any ‘total switch’ to either Russian or any other software as opposed to Microsoft’s one. It is possible, though, that a licensed operating system will be installed on PCs alongside a pirated version of MS Windows.

In the meantime, Minster for IT and Communication Leonid Reiman announced that all school computers in Russia would have been fitted with Russian software by 2009.