Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond

My employer is a manufacturer with yearly revenue in the multibillion $ range. Our conversion to XP didn't "complete" until well after Vista hit the street and even now a fair number of Win2k installs remain running. Right now, new issue laptops still come with XP Pro and they tend to have a 3 year turnaround cycle. Office hasn't been updated either - there's no business driver for that at the moment - I run the 2003 version of Office.

Blue

 

The last and final version of MS Office I used and paid through my pocket was Office 2002. It was buggy, Outlook would regularly crash, sometimes it would not retrieve mail or hang in between, worse of all, I would loose mail from servers. When Outlook or Word would be switched off it would still stay in memory refusing to load again till the first instance was terminated via taskbar. Last straw was when I got infected and my mail was used to mass mail others on my list. MS knew about these issues and even SP1 didn't fix that. I switched to OO and after months of learning curve, never looked back. With its vast array of plugins you can almost do anything and in case of Math, we have another freesource high level Latex front end called Lyx doing a splendid job. Latex is one fine example of being the best in open source and very few paid ones can come close to its capabilities.

 

This is the same situation with my employer. The parent company is a multi-billion dollar enterprise with quite a few web based apps that we use, and this more or less locks us into XP and Office 2003, both of which work fine. But I don't see change anytime soon for us. It would take an act of Congress for the IT folks in the parent to rewrite their applications and upgrade systems and PCs.

 

If one just cares to look beyond the US scene, things are different in other parts of the world. There are two nations currently with two billion people, even if 10% uses open source, think of the numbers. When piracy laws toughen up and real punishment starts to be meted out, you will see a mass exodus by pirates toward open source.

 

Quite right. The situation in the major developed economies (US, EU, etc.) is a best case scenario in many respects. Even here MS should really rethink their approach. The problem is the hubris which comes with dominance. By the time reality intrudes, it's often too late.

Blue