This blog is part of the Microsoft “The Ultimate Steal” Blogging Contest. Go to www.theultimatesteal.ca for details.
It appears I have to say how three Microsoft Office products will be responsible for my success in school. I will do better and explain how every single Microsoft product in the world gets me through school every day. They give me the self-esteem and confidence needed to ace (or nearly ace) every assignment, test and quiz… why? Because I feel incredibly lucky to be one of the people who DOES NOT USE THEM!
Even if I wanted Microsoft Office, that would not be an option because I use GNU/Linux and mostly open source software on top of it. Openoffice is a free high quality office suite for Windows, Mac, Linux, OS/2, BSD, Solaris, OpenVMS, IRIX and other operating systems you have probably never heard of. If you think a program cannot be good because it is free, think again. Secunia has found several bugs in the exalted new Office 2007 release. These bugs are not so bad you say? Conversely the number of unpatched vulnerabilities in OpenOffice .org is zero. The same is true for Mozilla Thunderbird vs Outlook and Mozilla Firefox vs Internet Explorer which can’t even pass the Acid2 test. (Firefox 3 alpha 2 does).
Let’s look at all the ways Sun has you beat. Solaris is by far superior to Windows as is Linux in case you haven’t figured that out. Look at the server market share: Linux + Apache is in the lead! The Java programming language is better than Visual Basic? No shit, visual basic doesn’t even let you program. Making a web browser in visual basic is clicking and dragging a shitty closed source ActiveX object onto the window and deciding what size you want it to be which brings me to another point. ActiveX pales in comparison to the JVM and so does your ancient unofficial JVM for IE that could be topped by almost every open source alternative on the market.
Linux adheres to real standards made by the ISO and the IEEE based on technical merit, while you microsoft clowns invent your own formats that only you have control over and let your monopolies bitch on and on about how its the best thing since Sony rootkits. Perhaps your first attempt to go away from this has been your “Open”XML format, oh wait.
Speaking of this format, it is just about the only one that Openoffice can’t read yet. Openoffice can read formats from OpenDocument, StarOffice, M$Office, M$ Works, Wordperfect, RTF and Lotus. It can even read M$Office formats that you have been too lazy to implement in newer versions of your own software… see? It has also beaten you to having PDF exporting by YEARS. And about OpenXML support, Novell has released a converter for OpenOffice and that along with PDF import are planned for the 2008 release. If Microsoft users want even a taste of this much interoperability they can download Sun’s ODF plugin… that’s right! It is open source programmers doing their part to give M$Office as well as their own programs more compatibility. You Microsoft employees need to shape up.
Why is Office so expensive? $64*15,000 students = $0.96 million in my school alone. Maybe because of the advertising and the propaganda, the fact that it’s on the top shelf of every store, the fact that Office users have never heard of the REAL programs that can save them time and money. I was in the campus computer store yesterday and someone was asking for a copy of Microsoft Office. I chuckled to myself and thought that she has much to learn when the staff actually recommended OpenOffice to her and helped her install it saying “It’s like using no-name shampoo, no difference really.”
Microsoft also pays people to make sure people pay for its software. I laughed my ass off when my friend was trying to do “product activation.” It was a copy of Office that he had actually paid for and he had simply forgotten where his key was when he upgraded his computer. The “employee” would not let him use the copy he owned so he went to freeserials.com, tried again and it worked that time. HINT: Nobody go there unless you use a real browser like Firefox, Opera, Safari, Netscape, Iceweasel, Swiftfox, Amaya, Links, Lynx, Elinks, Links2, the browser built into GoogleEarth, etc.
I guess that’s because no one can really own Microsoft software at all. Microsoft actually says it in their EULA. M$Office likes to refuse to run on non-genuine windows operating systems. This does not only mean pirated copies of windows, it means compatibility layers like Wine. These do not steal any money from Microsoft and actually foster healthy competition but M$ is proud of its anti-competitive practices and purposely rejects wine as stated here.
I just read an ad for Halo2 for PC that says only for Windows VistaTM. It apperas Microsoft is proud of the fact that they force people to upgrade to Vista just because they are too greedy to “port” DirectX10 to XP.
Microsoft left the OpenGL consortium years ago because they are proud of the fact that DirectX10 may be used in more consumer pieces of garbage, while OpenGL is used in some of the top 500 clusters, ILM rendering for Hollywood films, accurate engineering applications and computing that really matters.
Microsoft has about 11 versions of Office 2007 all with different inclusions and licensing terms and the balls to sue non-profit organizations for using open source programs that supposedly infringe on Microsoft patents. Guess what? Even if you get all of North America to believe this bullshit, Linux will just be hosted in Europe which doesn’t recognize software patents! With all of these failures and more, it would appear as though Microsoft is proud of the fact that it sucks.
More on KOffice, StarOffice, Abiword and Gnumeric later!
Tags: BSD, Linux, M$, Microsoft Office, open source, Openoffice, Solaris
