I don’t hate Microsoft. Nor am I some sort of open source fanboy. Indeed, I am able to admire the achievements Bill Gates has made. He’s a very wealthy man and I can envy his success without feeling any resentment or bitterness. Good luck to him. And, having used MS software over the last decade or so, I’ve had no complaints. However… There’s always a however…
I have, over the years, become increasingly irritated by Microsoft’s business model. The sheer domination of the market and the bloated prices for increasingly bloated software make keeping up both expensive and difficult as an arms race develops between software and hardware, forcing expensive hardware upgrades just to run the damn stuff.
Some time ago I switched to Firefox and have used it exclusively as my browser ever since. The ability to add extensions that customise it to my own preferences along with its speed make it an ideal browsing tool – not least, there is the wonderful AdBlock extension, which, despite what some arseholes claim is not stealing; it is making my browsing experience better.
I did try the Thunderbird mail client at about the same time, but didn’t get on with it. I have revisited it recently and it has matured somewhat since my first excursion. Not least, there is now the Lightning calendar extension making it a suitable replacement for Outlook. One other niggle was the inability to synchronise my pocket PC with Thunderbird. A shareware plug-in from Birdiesync does the job admirably. This little tool links into MS Activesync and Thunderbird so seamlessly that you don’t notice and unlike other offerings is simple to set up by the average user. Well worth the asking price of just under €20, so I will be registering my copy.
Then there’s Office. When I bought my first PC I used Wordperfect as my word processor. That eventually became part of the Corel stable – and what happened to the Lotus suite? It became a part of IBM and then what? Does anyone use this software or is everyone simply going for the easy option and using MS Office? That is what I mean about MS – everything else that used the same basic business model – bloody expensive applications upgraded regularly at inflated prices – seems to have withered upon the vine leaving Microsoft virtually alone in the marketplace. Or is that just my imagination working overtime?
I really cannot afford to replace my current Office Suite. I probably don’t need to. However, I decided to look at OpenOffice. Okay, so it’s early days yet, but here is a fully functional office suite that does everything that I want for the huge sum of nothing, zero, nada and that is a difficult price to beat. As business models go, I’m impressed. I’m impressed, too, with the word processor – I can read and write Word documents, so have compatibility with those whom I need to send my articles and yet don’t have to buy expensive software to do it. So far, everything that I wanted to do in Word I have been able to do in Writer. I haven’t as yet, delved too deeply into the other applications as I haven’t needed them so far.
This experience begs the question; why buy an expensive upgrade? The answer is, that skint as I am, I don’t need to. MS Office is still on my machine for the moment while I adapt to my new applications – but it’s looking increasingly likely that it will go sooner rather than later.
Will I eventually ditch my MS operating system? Maybe, just maybe…