In my wife’s company, they use a version of Microsoft Office that is a few years old. There’s nothing unusual about that. This is a situation found in small businesses across the country.
It's enough to drive you crazy
She received a document from a new client yesterday, who uses a newer version of Word. The document was in the .docx format, which cannot be opened or read natively by previous versions of Word.
So far, so Microsoft. The options for my wife appeared to be to either install the ‘compatibility pack‘ released by Microsoft or to rush out and buy a copy of the latest version of Microsoft Office – priced around £216 at Amazon for the upgrade version.
In the end, she went with option 3, which wasn’t on the original menu. She sent the file to me and I opened it in my Open Office word processor, saved it as a Word document, and sent it back to her.
So, here’s the thing. The beauty of open source software is that when changes need to be made to the code, they get made quickly, get tested quickly, and released quickly. You also get the updated version of the code without paying for an upgrade. Microsoft’s genius has to be to convince a huge number of businesses that they need to pay for quality software and then keep paying to stay up to date.
As more businesses migrate more and more of their application to the web and become more savvy about open source, this business model will begin to ring more and more hollow.
How much are you paying for software functionality you don’t need?
(In the interests of transparency, I must state that the picture above is not of my wife!)
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