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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No, I’m not about to encourage you to start using pirate copies of software.

But I’m confused, I must say.

As businesses continue to trim (or hack back, even) their costs, they continually fail to look at their software licenses.

I speak to many owners of small businesses who complain that the cost of Microsoft Office software is too high. Then they complain that they need to upgrade their computers because the new versions of Office need more memory and processing power.

Mention Linux, of course, and complexions pale. “We just don’t have anyone to support that,” they say. They don’t have anyone to support Windows Vista or Windows 7, either, but that seems not to matter.

Let me tell you what I run on my laptop. (I moved permanently from desktops to laptops about 4 years ago.)

Operating System: Windows XP Pro (it came with the laptop – now a few years old)
Email Software: Thunderbird (from Mozilla)
Browser: Firefox (from Mozilla)
‘Office’ Suite: Open Office (from SUN)

With the exception of XP, all my ‘business’ software is open source and free, as in beer. Unlike Microsoft software, the developers continually strive to make it more efficient so that it runs on lower and lower spec machines.

On my new Netbook – with Windows XP Home pre-installed – I run Firefox and a text editor. If I need to use office-like capabilities, I use Google Docs. That way, I can easily access any files from my other machine.

I have never found it a problem to be without Microsoft Office. Open Office can read Microsoft Office documents and can even save files in MS Office format. There are no variations in package, either: there is no ‘pro’ or ‘home’ or ’standard’. Download it and you get everything: spreadsheet, database, word processor, presentation software. It even gives you the option to export files to PDF. If you find yourself needing some of the more obscure functionality within MS Word or MS Powerpoint, I think you’re probably spending too much time worrying about appearance over substance.

The next laptop I buy will probably have Windows 7 on it. I shall remove that and install Linux. As I need less and less applications running on my personal computer, I need an operating system that is robust, quick to load, and secure. Open Office. Thunderbird, and Firefox run as easily in Linux as in Windows. The new Google operating system Android (which runs on my HTC Magic phone) may also be an option for operating system.

Isn’t it time you thought about freeing yourself from inflated software costs?

In a future post, I’ll look at other free and open source tools that can save your business time, money, and headache.

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