The Dreamworld of Propriety Software

IT professionals are supposed to be knowledgeable about technology. Yet it makes me wonder what world these people are living in when they state their company won’t be changing from Microsoft Office to competing software such as Open Office.

I’ve lost count of the posts on various tech websites where the authors go to painstaking depths to relive their experience of open source or free software. It seems a foregone conclusion among these people competing for their place in the spotlight that they need to agree, rather disappointedly, that they tried the software for a week or a two, a month and although it’s promising and has evolved considerably in the past years, it’s just not ready for the mass market.

After the eulogy they return to their Windows operated workplaces and continue to lock their company in to propriety software, costing the company not only hefty licensing fees but also more for resource hungry hardware. This is the world of Microsoft and it won’t change. Microsoft will continue to sell insecure, badly designed and overpriced software to its clients. When an IT manager suggests to management the company upgrades to the latest Microsoft software, financial managers take a deep breath when they analyse the amount of money the company has to spend.

There is an alternative and one that is quickly becoming more prevalent in the market place and in government institutions. The alternative is Open Office, the open source productivity suite built and supported by a community of developers. Open Office has all features of Microsoft Office but is free of charge and less resource intensive. Perhaps most importantly, Open Office advocates the use of the Open Document Format (ODF), an ISO standard digital format. This format was unanimously approved during the ISO balloting process, a stark contrast to the balloting fiasco which rejected Microsoft’s Open XML format.

The reason why the ODF will increase its prominence is due to the fact that it is an ISO standard. Governments and businesses needing to archive documents digitally and have the guarantee that should they need to access a document in fifty years time they will be able to do so. The ODF format provides this guarantee.

Microsoft does not due to their continually changing formats. Some of their older documents cannot be accessed by the latest offerings of their Office software. Microsoft’s formats, although widely used, are not standards. They are propriety formats which do not allow competitors to create compatible software which can reproduce the format. What this means is if a someone using an application other than Microsoft Office needs to save the document in the .doc format, there is a chance the same document will not be able to be accessed correctly using Microsoft Office.

In essence, Microsoft are holding the users of its products to ransom. If I use one Microsoft format for a number of years and then find out Microsoft plan to alter the format and require me to purchase the latest costly version of their software, I have no choice. I can either upgrade or continue to use the older software but should I encounter problems with it, Microsoft will no longer continue to support it.

To the contributors of tech blogs and IT managers who continue to insist they will never change to open source software because it is inferior to propriety software; try to keep your financial directors away from technology websites, as one day you will be required to explain why you have not considered a cheaper and in a lot of cases, better alternative to costly propriety software.