Discussion on:

I don't know why or how you would say goodbye to Microsoft

Are you looking forward to a day where you can be Microsoft-product-free? I am curious why that would be an important goal for you?

The last piece I used was Excel, and that not on my own system. Since then I use Mariner Calc.

Why? Because, in the tradition of Ill-Begotten Monstrosities, their systems and software stink. And when they acquired a company with a decent product, they rushed to wreck it. (One example that comes easily to mind was FoxBase, which is still propping up their Access and SQL Server kludges. For a time I worked at a firm that developed text editing and word processng apps and dug around in Word's innards to be able to import and export files, and it was just ugly... as were some of the things it did to my text files back when I was shuttling files amongst varied systems regularly when I worked at the U.)

It's important to use systems and apps that facilitate productivity rather than getting in your way as IBM and MSFT have always done.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6wTKLFoWxs

it is relatively hard to convert to a Linux distro or OSX. I realize satellite DVRs use Linux, but I just don't have the time to geek out all the ways to setup a media center that will work. I do like my HDTV entertainment. I've actually had better luck with Vista. Many of my clients have had problems that are unlivable with Win7 OEM machines. I suspect cheap Chinese components and bad drivers.

Wow, reads like a Microsoft press release.

I have no problem with Microsoft products, but if they don't work and play well with other NON-MS products, I have no use for them whatsoever.

So, if my Ford doesn't play nice with my Android phone or my SkyDrive has no option for my LInux desktop, I'm not buying the products embedding MS either.

Years ago I gave myself the challenge of "doing everything I do in Windows, in Linux". by about 2010 that was pretty much my situation at home (work uses Windows but I don't use Windows for private things so it was fairly well separated).

I have only been returning to Microsoft in some ways out of a new focus but so far everything I moved back, I am capable of doing its equivalent in Linux.

Between business and home, having kids I bring up (trying too) in a tech environment, I was finding MS and the needed software was generally cost prohibitive (ex: child can use notebook in class, no internet, Winword, Excel and Powerpoint required). We tried a number of ways to minimize cost.

So I gave No MS a try.
Ouch. (personally I like MS)

For home all too often teachers graded on computer work that involved specific use of MSOffice software or software available only on Windows. Sorry, GDocs and iWork won't do. The list grew. It quickly turned into a "game" of do your work then run it through Dad's work notebook or (if you can get time on one) a desktop in the school pc lab. While this was an exception (say less than 30%) it wasted more time trying to find work-arounds and directly affected the kids grades. So for home use it was back to MS....

For work it was another story. My work laptop had to have Win XP - no choice. Period.
My personal work laptop was more flexible but once again I quickly ran into the same issue my kids were seeing. Interacting with clients, partners and others, MS was the predominant software. You can't just jump into a collaberative presentation running Google or OO and most are running MSOffice. They are compatible but do not mesh well at the detail level. there are a lot of functions these do not share or do differently.

End of the day, for both work and home, it required a good bit of effort to slip into a non-MS world and there were tasks you could not do outside of it.

While I applaud those who are or have tried something different, it doesn't work for me.

So today I use Win7, Win8 (test), OSX SL, Android, and iOS.
Stealing a line from a competitor, "MS; it just works."

M$ just works provided you have the right version.

With the current generation of Schools they just say submit in Word which is great if it's the right version you have on your system way too often the school has the newest version and you have to submit in it or the next oldest. If you have an older version most times it doesn't open correctly to be usable for school kids. So you have to go out and buy a copy of Word 2010 which means Office 2010 for each child you have at school submitting electronically. Then if they use a Slate you have to convert from the native format of that device to the School Supported format which isn't always easy/possible.

Then on the other side of the fence Business here who submit Government Tenders Electronically are asked for Word Format which means submit in Word 2003 because the Government Systems can not correctly read 2007 or 2010 Word Docs correctly if at all.

Where I have a problem with M$ is their lack of Standards they make up their own which wouldn't be such a bad thing if they supported their Standards but they don't so you have masses of compatibility problems between different versions of the same thing.

Just try to open a Word 95 Document on your new Windows 7 Computer with the Trial Version of Office 2010 and see what happens. Then try the same thing with a Government Archived Document in PDF and it just opens.

That is where M$ has messed up everything their inability to support the standards that they make themselves and it upsets a lot of their users.

Oh and By The Way you can not dictate to another company or Government Department to install something on their computers to read your Documents. That is a Big No No which no one at M$ has yet appreciated.

Col

our schools computers are so old this isnt a problem in the same way.

I went with Ubuntu, then Mint and finally wound up with Oz Ultimate Edition which is a little bloated with multiple apps for the same jobs but is extremely fast and has (thus far, its been up now 24-7 for over a month with now trouble) given me less trouble than XP ever did. And I liked XP, it was Vista that prompted my move...

As I'm a single parent, the Gov gave my daughter a free laptop. A nice Satellite Pro with Win7, MS Office suite, Visual Studio and a ton of other stuff.
It took me days to clean out all the free crap and she started using it. Within a few weeks it was a mess despite the AV suite, I reinstalled it from the restore disk and went through cleaning out the crapware again.

Then my daughter told me that she never uses any of the hundreds of pounds worth of proprietary software because the schools computers all run older versions that complain unless she downgrades anything she creates, and she couldnt use the schools network drives, only the internet access.

So I scraped Windows off it, and gave her Ubuntu with LibreOffice and Firefox and it connects seamlessly to the schools computers, reads and writes all the documents without fuss and doesnt require constant poking or cleaning.

It IS quite possible and easy to divorce Microsoft, my daughter had no trouble, and I personally much prefer writing in Python to VB anyway. Granted I'm not a software house that has to support the prevalent paradigm to make a living, which is where Windows has always won out, but I cant see a reason not to stick up a couple of very british fingers at Microsoft, despite being a staunch supporter of DOS and Windows since 2.01, my first MS products.

Just my pennyworth.

Here on Andalucia(Spain) the goverment put on every children hands a Linux Netbook with a linux distro supported by public administration... Looking at this with me experience i think this is the better solution ... it's cheaper that closed systems for goverment ...i'm running linux at home for last ten years and it's more versatile that others OS and simply works...

I have several applications (and even hardware stuff) don't work in my linux. This is why I keep a windows 7 64bit at home.

Bravo to your insightful, technical yet readable summary.
I also left Win with the advent of Vista, and I might add Vista left a bad taste.

A new NB loaded with PC OS and Liber Office when out to a clients grandchild because they didn't need Windows.

Couldn't do the School Work well at least it was claimed that the school couldn't read the work. I restored the Win 7 64 Bit OS and loaded Office 2003 the client in question has a Volume License and a lot more Licenses than they could ever use and along with the Software Assurance they have paid a Large Fortune to M$ for Products that they are not actually using.

Don't ask me why as that is exactly what I asked this place when I first started there.

Anyway the 7 System worked a treat but every assignment submitted in Office 2003 was rejected by the Teachers so a Retail Version of 2010 was installed and the school is now happy.

I do see problems with the need to purchase new Hardware and Software just so that you can show the Teachers at your School that you are understanding their lessons, I see something fundamentally wrong with the system being so closed in but hopefully with the advent of iOS and Droid will mean a lot more Cross Platform Support will be introduced so that this isn't an issue.

OH and with that client if I take anything into that place with a Windows Vista or newer sticker on it I get thrown out. I'm not really sure what Microsoft did to upset them but I do know that one Representative from M$ had the dog set on them and since that time they have refused to have anything to do with any M$ product newer than XP. Neither them or M$ will tell me what happened and that makes life very difficult.

Col

G'day Col,

Last year I, along with others and over half of them were mature age students, did a course at a NSW TAFE. Part of the course was the use of MS Office and everything they had was based on MS Office 2010, including the special TAFE printed manuals. The stuff was clearly written by teachers and NOT ones who were tech experienced as they had many tech terms incorrectly defined and used. However, everything was such that all work and assignments HAD to be done in Office 2010 and all the TAFE PCs only had Win Vista with Office 2010 and the ribbon system, no menu options (I don't know if the old style menus are available in MSO 2010). Well, most common actions that used to be two or three clicks in the old menus were five to eight clicks in the ribbons. All the students used to MSO 97 to MSO 2003 were totally stuffed and had major issues with these ribbons with large icons that took up five times the screen space the menus used to. Those who'd never used MSO before also had troubles as they learned, but they were a bit quicker as they didn't have to unlearn the older menu system.

In the end I found a much more efficient way of using MSO 2010 - I dug out an old set of books I had for MS Word 2a, Excel 4, and Access 2 and made photocopies of the keyboard shortcuts listed in the books. Not all worked, but over 90% of them did. I handed them out to the other students and work went much faster when we left the ribbons shrunk down in the corner and sued the keyboard only, very rarely touching the mouse after we opened MSO. Now that's what you call an advanced form of software improvement, isn't it, Mate?

Oh, any mention of the manuals having wrong meanings resulted in a comment of "Shut up and do as the book says." The fact the book was copyrighted to the TAFE may have been part of that, but none of the noted authors had any formal tech quals or experience noted

Ernest

and as long as I downloaded all the converters for the machines they were using, I don't recollect any complaints about any components not working. One of them had Novell, but Ooo seemed to open those documents well, if I remember correctly. One of my old XP Windows machines came with WordPerfect anyway. It was a DELL OEM.

Actually Open Office seemed to open just about everything well enough to function. I haven't used it for a while though.

they had no converters installed on their systems and an exercise done on Open Office or Libre Office and converted to .docx did NOT come up on MSO 2010 the exact same way as one done in MSO 2010. I checked and the same issue happened if done in MSO 2007, viewed in MSO 2010 it had a slight format difference. Also, an assignment done in OO or LO showed that in the meta information and the teachers would not accept a completed assignment if the meta information showed it was NOT done in MSO 2010 - I think that was wrong of them, but they had the last say.

thanks for posting DE!!

I agree it was silly forcing people to use an MS format, whatta bunch of chumps!

TAFE NSW is actually made up of 9 or 10 different Institutes (simply due to the size of NSW). Just wondering which Institute this was with as each Institute is different in the way machines are built and what software is installed in the machine images etc.

(edit).....never mind it appears it was Riverina(?)

Yes, it was Riverina, however the TAFE system is broken up into management units it's still under the one overall administration and policy for them all from the state HQ. Many of their policies are simply aimed to get more money and have no bearing on the realities of life or education.

That is one of my biggest complaints about Microsoft Office. The ever changing doc format and the ever changing UI.

The law firm I work at still uses Wordperfect (X4). You should here the cussing when they have to 'clean up' all the cludge in a Word Doc. Word Perfect opens every Word Perfect version all the way back to Word Perfect 5 (that is a DOS version). A few of the younger generation have come in and complained about using WordPerfect but after a couple of months, they always say: "Ah, I see now. Things are so much easier to do with WP." You can reveal codes in Wordperfect, so that you can find out what is wrong and fix it. Try that in Word.

Sending docs to other firms is always fun. Send it as a DocX (MS Word 2007-2010) and they need a DOC (MsWord =2003), or they want it as a RTF. Then try to file it with the courts and the real fun begins.

I used to discourage students from using it, even if they were in WordPerfect class! I derisively called it "Word Imperfect" and used a non Microsoft solution to get them to finish their documents, then covert them to WordPerfect. This solved a lot of their problems. They never really learned Word Perfect this way, but they made their grade points, that was all that mattered to them - they were already convinced they'd never use it again. This is in the bad ol' Windows 3.1 days.

1) Any idea what you'll be doing next?

2) Will someone else be taking over the Windows column?

I'm not so much a fanboy anymore for any brand. All brands are good and bad you know?

Why?

Lack of openness prevents my company from inspecting, improving, and modifying Windows in our organization. The result is that we simply cannot justify deploying a "black box" unless we have no other choice. We do not use Apple devices for the same reason despite their appeal.

How?

This is similar to the kind of upgrade / migration that is necessary when switching from XP to Vista / Seven, but I don't think that's what you are asking. I get the feeling your question has more to do with applications. Admittedly, this has been the sticking point, but not in the way you may think.

Open / Libre Office kept me from loosing my mind when MS moved to the ribbon menu. Likewise, over the last decade the Open Source apps I have used have generally been more stable in feature set and UI than their MS counterparts, keeping me sane and productive.

Better still, if I don't like the way something works, I can either find a module to do what I want, or modify the code if the issue is significant enough to merit this level of attention. Only two apps have hit this mark, one being our firewall, and the other being file system crypto.

Are the apps different? Of course. They are generally coded to provide similar services, but not reverse engineered, which means there will (and must) be differences. Has this been an issue? Yes, but mostly no. New employees have a short learning curve, the record being a woman who no longer is in our employ who took a week. The rest came up to speed in under 4 hours.

The biggest thing I miss is Visio. Dia is okay, but lacks the polish and object libraries from vendors. The thing I miss least is licensing and software costs. We are running a colaborative design project which would have cost us a quarter million dollars in software before we even got started. Thanks to Linux Mint, Libre Office, Evolution, BRL CAD, Planner, and other minor players, our software costs going into the project were zero.

Bottom line: Our statistics indicate choosing alternatives to Microsoft was a great move for us, but I do not believe that everyone should. Sometimes the risk and loss of productivity during a learning curve may cost more than the licensing fees will save over the life of the business or project. As with everything, do the math and use what works.

Currently we are working on finding alternatives that will give us the ability to have our users do they work in non-Windows machines. We are almost MS Office free; there are only a couple of Excel spreadsheets with VB code we are migrating to a SQL + Web environment. But we extensively use AutoCAD for electrical drawings and despite the recent release of a new version for Mac, their reps have confirmed there are no plans for Linux versions.
I see you mentioned BRL CAD; is that or any other product that you might be familiar with, compatible with AutoCAD?
AutoCAD and Adobe Acrobat are our last barriers to full move to an alternative OS like Linux.
I share with you the sentiment about MS Visio; I suspect that the lack of support from vendors for the alternatives is what makes Visio so relevant.
Thanks for your comment; it is very encouraging.
Regards,

For those must have Windows only apps you can always take a look at Citrix App Server. I don't kno whow well it would support Autocad, but it is certainly worth a look.

There are many alternatives for Acrobat on linux, depending on the version you use and feature set you need I dont' know if they would work for you or not. Again if not App Server may be a great option.

BRL-CAD can read and write DXF files. Fair warning: there is a steep learning curve, but we feel that its worth it. BRL-CAD has superior materials simulation that Autocad since it was made for ballistics research. We are able to simulate motion (articulation) and other things Autocad requires modules for (at additional cost). Finally, it is free and open. What's not to like?

Thanks for the input; it will be worth to try. Beside the learning curve, have you ever encounter any compatibility issues with AutoCAD files sent to you by other parties?
@ tech: I'm aware of Citrix App Server but I was looking at a more simple way to migrate to Linux. Thanks for your comments..

I don't think there is a Linux version. No problem for Macs. However I don't know if it is compatible with AutoCAD files, or SQL.

Nope, never had an issue. In fact, we have had clients send us designs to test for motion and structural analysis, something Autocad requires an EXPENSIVE plug in to do.

I have recently moved my main desktop over to CentOS and my laptop over to Fedora (better wireless support). I still use Windows for my domain controllers but my mail, web, and proxy are now CentOS as well.

|If you really want to disconnect from MS products, you'd have to ensure you never connect to a Windows server, that your packets on a network never go near a Windows server,...

It's MUCH harder to do than even this article describes.

You have to be joking right? I can connect to a Windows Server with Linux, or Mac OS for that matter no problem.

The point of the article was why would you not pay Microsoft for their products.

If you want to call usage a packet that comes from some server a half world away everyone 'uses' linux more than they use Windows. Even Microsoft runs linux for some of their servers. Google doesn't use M$, neither does Facebook.

although Mrs. Wiz sometimes prefers Ford makes, her current model is a
Mercury Milan...oh, my bad! Personal computers, ah, ok...ya know, it's much
the same...Chevy and Ford, Windows and Linux...I use both.
Sometimes I prefer plain old DOS though. ( I sure do miss my 1974 Chevy
Nova!)

Drive Fords! Seriously though, those who think they have completely kicked MS to the curb are delusional. There are so many devices running embedded forms of Windows it is staggering. Do you own any sort of flash drive, sd chip of any sort? MS now owns virtually all the current licenses regarding that file system. As far as I know there is only one exception to that rule and that is Sony. The old dog didn't get as old as it is by being completely eat up with the D__B-ass. Seems they are milking everything they can out of their technology. Who can fault them for that? For such a young company wielding so much weight, they could have a far worse track record than they have currently.
Looking back, I think that the largest numbers of people jumping ship from MS has probably been the result of the company losing sight of one of Bill's greatest policies while he was at the helm. That being "BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY" . Sure it held things back at times technologically, but that policy likely played as much a role in the companies early success as anything.

First of all those flash drives don't have software on them from Microsoft, they have a license to use FAT32 File System. If I choose most of them can be formatted with another file system and they will work just fine.

Second. If you want to talk about embedded OS. Linux is embedded probably several magnitudes more devices the Microsoft. You couldn't avoid linux if you tried. It is in everything from phones, routers, to washing machines, to TV's, DVD Players, DVRs... The list goes on and on.

Third. I think it is obvious that people are choosing not to directly PAY Microsoft for their products. You can't completely avoid M$ any more than you can avoid Linux or java.

MS is often better know by nicknames like Microsloth, Microsleaze, etc. There's a reason. They aren't just big, they have a tendency to not listen to their customers. Sometimes their work is great, sometimes awful. I have no plan to leave MS. But I wish they'd sell me - at a reasonable price, the Office features I need and want, and wouldn't try to force the toddler oriented MUTRO Windoze 8 GUI on me. So unless they change Windoze 8, I won't get it. Period, unless I get a free downgrade to Win 7. Personally, I don't like UNIX and its variants. They are typically nasty, unfriendly, and guided by the whims of the current set of geeks controlling things. Unity 2 and 3 almost make Win 8 look usable. But you'd think MS would know better after Windoze ME and Windoze VISTA.

All the MS-Haters, Linux-Ajatollahs, Apple-Prayer and Prophets of the absolute truth - who cares?
Believers versus realists and pragmatists. IT is a tool, not a religion. And Microsoft provide good stuff, I like it. And the whole world use it.

Hear! Hear! - yes I.T. is a tool and Microsoft make some very good tools. Umpteen million users world-wide testify to that.

You'll find disciples worshiping Linux and Windows too. Fanaticism isn't confined to Apple followers.