It’s been said a thousand times before, but the purchase of PlaceWare by Microsoft got me thinking again about the real monopoly wielded by Microsoft – Office. It makes a ton of cash for MS, dominates the interchange of documents in offices all over the world. I reckon I have a pretty typical experience – between myself and clients the common file format is word and powerpoint, in fact it’s more likely they have the ability to read a word file than a pdf. I have a mac and pc on my desk – I move freely between the two, but the commonality for me is Word. I actually quite like Word – I use quite a lot of it’s features; tracking, versioning, styles, database integration etc etc. Which is lucky, because I can say pretty much everyone who I change documents with wants a Word doc.
The file format is fine, but although there are a slew of alternatives out there; OpenOffice, StarOffice and AbiWord, to name a few word/office compatible apps, no one I know seems to use them. Yet.
An article on usa today (by way of stephen downes) really drove home to me the dominance and reliance of Office within the enterprise. The article is worth reading as it describes the heavy tactics that MS use and how Houston council (?) dismissed restrospective licensing claims from MS – which tried to punitively force Offiice XP upgrades! The result? An interesting and racy story of a software entrepeneur and bent official that resulted in city-wide adoption of SimDesk a distributed, low-cost office alternative.
There’s some hope – office 11 will use xml as a data format, or rather, it will be a ‘save as’ option, so the default stays proprietary. Oh well. And Apple seems to be chipping at PowerPoint (Keynote is pretty interesting, btw – worthy of another post). And yes, Apple probably hold a more successful monopoly over me than MS.
And what does this have to with e-learning? Well, I think anything we do to encourage open standards for data interchange benefits both clients and us. Do I have the balls to do as Mr Downes does?
“…So: starting today, I vow to remove Microsoft from my life. I want it off my desktop in my office, I want it off my laptops (personal and professional), I want it off the three computers in my home network, I want it off my iPaq. I want it out of my life. I will happily take the several thousands of dollars I have personally spent on Microsoft software and junk it (since, after all, it’s illegal to donate it to charity). No longer will I accept the argument that says, “everyone else uses it.” I won’t be using it. Incompatibility will become their problem (as it always should have been, when you use software that doesn’t play well with others)….”
Um, well, I’ll use office alternatives, especially Outlook which is the most absurdly designed piece of software ever to darken my screen, but I don’t think I’m quite ready to say to clients – “I’m sorry, I’m only sending you unicode text from now on” will go down particularly well. But I will push pdf – with annotation and versioning. Oh wait, doing anything other than reading a pdf requires a full version of Acrobat. Oh well, cvs anyone?