A growing number of small firms are fighting a microsoft addiction, according to an article at The Register.
Working as I do for a small company, we have a large number of technologists who are keen to run a variety of technologies. With about 20 employees, we have three Apple powerbooks, five or six Linux laptops, and the remainder are MS. Our entire company technology infrastructure is non-Windows, mainly because we try to practice what we preach: There are alternatives.
Prior to running a Mac, I ran Linux (mainly SuSE but lately redhat). The biggest problem itself wasn’t the OS, the e-mail, or anything like that. It was the other people, running Microsoft Office, getting upset when I sent them documents with slightly out formatting.
The problem was down to OpenOffice: It was only about 90% compatible with Word, and as such, formatting in some of the complex documents we produce, could go slightly awry. As such, and when we were smaller we had just 2 Linux and the rest as Microsoft users, ‘discussions’ would ensue. Word usually won. Fair enough: I quite like Word as a word processor, but it still strikes me as odd that spending £400+ on an office package, compared to a free one, as a standard - makes any sort of sense.
Interoperability with clients is vital: We don’t ever want to loose business because of file format ideology (as preached by RMS), but one license to ‘prettify’ a document, and the rest as free (or Sun’s close-to-free) makes much more sense.
The bottom line is this: it can be hard in the consultancy game to play the open-standards rule when a few people insist on playing the microsoft-products-are-best rules. This is where I’m certainly not feeling guilty about running a Mac. I have the best of both worlds (including, dare I say it, MS Office for OS X). But in any future venture, I like to think it’ll be Macs or Linux boxes, running Open Office, bar none, with one Word license for ‘prettifying’.
Entries (RSS)
February 2nd, 2004 at 3:45 pm
Since any Mac OSX application can produce an acrobat file (pdf) why not just send pdf’s to windows users? They can open and read with Acrobat Reader.
February 2nd, 2004 at 3:49 pm
I can, and do do that. Lovely stuff it is too.
My point is interoperability between works-in-progress, ie. you write a word document, send it to me, I work on it in (Star|Open)Office, send it back, and formatting went out of the window, and PHB types get upset.
r.
February 2nd, 2004 at 4:29 pm
My experience pretty much follows yours. Most people are tolerant of using pdf files or text only files. Some insist on using Word. Depending on the relationship I either ignore them or comply.
One objection people have to getting pdf files is that they can’t edit them. They like to get word files because they can modify them on pass on the modified document.
It would be really great if the world could decide on an open source word processing document format.
February 2nd, 2004 at 7:36 pm
John, you can edit pdf files. And it costs less than Word…
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/main.html
February 3rd, 2004 at 7:43 am
Uhhh, yeah Acrobat is an excellent product for editing and annotating PDF files, but anyone who tries to use it as a word processor for even five minutes is going to find it ten times slower and a hundred times more awkward to use than Word (which in turn is three times slower and five times as awkward as TextEdit :).
February 3rd, 2004 at 7:55 am
Oasis has already came up with an open standard file format. That’s what OpenOffice uses, as far as I’m aware.
February 3rd, 2004 at 10:08 am
I belive the correct word is “lose” the business