| Agreed, I don't see any posts in this thread arguing that MS charging for office is a bad thing. And I don't see any problem with charging money for productivity software either. But since the issue has been raised, I'll bite. I can articulate an ideological opposition to Microsoft Office's proprietary file formats which are a de-facto standard. The original Office file formats were entirely proprietary and MS explicitly used this to lock out competition. The OOXML formats in use since 2007 are technically an open spec, but one that is difficult to implement reliably. The only software product that is reliably compatible with MS Office is MS Office. For much of the HN crowd, Office documents isn't a big part of our job, but we're in the minority here. Most people are far more likely to open Word than any code editor. In my experience outside of the tech industry, document collaboration is primarily done through SharePoint, if not emailing Word and Excel docs. Scheduling is managed via Outlook/Exchange with their proprietary protocols. This isn't a problem as long as people are being productive on their own using MS Office. The problem is that files are widely distributed with the expectation that anyone can view and edit them. For example, my kids' school teachers regularly post homework assignments .doc or .docx format. I've also seen MS Office files from doctors' office and municipal governments. So there's free stuff like LibreOffice and Google Docs, which are mostly compatible with MS Office, and mostly sufficient for home or personal use. Usually .doc or .docx files open fine. Sometimes they come out looking like garbage. A typical business will want to be able to exchange documents with their customers and suppliers, to say nothing of years of legacy documents that they already have. Compatibility is important, and it is worth paying for. The notion that they're paying for software to make their employees more productive isn't a problem. The fact that they have no alternatives where to spend their money if they want to be compatible with their legacy docs and the rest of the world, that's a problem. |