I stumbled across an fairly good article, titled
Why Linux isn’t too fat & MS hurts customers, that enumerates reasons to switch from Microsoft to Linux (or, rather, to anything open source).

An excerpt:

The other big benefit is that companies can control their own destinies more finely by using Linux. When you use Windows, you get whatever version of Windows was shipping when you bought the PC.

Often, most of a company is using an older version of Office. Then someone gets a new PC with the latest Office, and starts sending around Word documents. People with the older versions of Office can’t read those, and pressure quickly rises to upgrade everyone to the latest Office. Microsoft could easily make the old and new file formats compatible, but they deliberately do the opposite to force unnecessary upgrades on the market.

The correct approach when your company stumbles into this situation is to take the opportunity to introduce OpenOffice into your company. Microsoft makes a big song and dance about “supporting what customers want,” but they really don’t support what customers want. Microsoft acts to protect its monopoly, rather than supporting what customers want.

At work, I tried to make the point that it might not be a good idea to encase the intellectual output of a thousand employees into formats whose proprietary owner not only has a record of extortionate capriciousness, but one who has broken the law to maintain its monopoly control of markets (I’m referring to Microsoft, of course), but I was ignored. One more reason to move on.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2005 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Digital Rights / Digital Wrongs, General, Linux, Microsoft Monopoly, Pigopoly. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.