Oh, so they thought they had piracy problems?
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| hioho Apr 19, 2007 3:12 PM EDT |
So here I am, sitting in Australia, looking at MS-Office priced (wholesale, ex-GST) at nearly $700, but in the next country over, it's available for $3. So I can download a “broken” copy of MS-Office for nothing. What's stopping me? Two things. First, there are no machines in this house running MS-Windows. Second, I can download their arch enemy, OpenOffice, for free also, & legitimately keep it. Thirdly, OpenOffice will spit out PDFs, and also does fairly reasonable HTML editing (unlike the cacophony spat out by MS-Word, of which O'Reilly reckon “the last thing you’d ever use is the ‘Save as Web Page…’ command in Word”), and can often recover broken MS-Office documents, oh, & isn't susceptible to macro viruses, runs on Linux (& Mac, & Solaris, etc), doesn't worsen Australia's balance of trade... what else...? I'm sure there must be something... Well, if the urge takes me I can always download Firefox and Thunderbird as well... & there's this PuTTY thing, & XMing — why, you could build about a third of a decent Linux system equivalent out of the Win32-based FOSS that's kicking around... I think that they won’t so much have piracy problems as wholesale desertion problems. |
| techiem2 Apr 19, 2007 3:58 PM EDT |
So now...the students get (limited) Winders/Office for $3 in school.
Then they graduate and realize they need/want the full stuff for their job.
Of course they think that means the full Winders/Office, since that's what they've been using.
So they shop.
But now they have a problem.
They realize the full versions are more than their salary for a year. So what do they do now? 1. They pirate it, thus losing MS a sale. 2. They somehow find out about Linux/OOo and switch, thus losing MS a sale. MS just can't win... |
| jsusanka Apr 19, 2007 7:08 PM EDT |
"Thirdly, OpenOffice will spit out PDFs, and also does fairly reasonable HTML editing (unlike the cacophony spat out by MS-Word, of which O'Reilly reckon “the last thing you’d ever use is the ‘Save as Web Page…’ command in Word”), and can often recover broken MS-Office documents, oh, & isn't susceptible to macro viruses, runs on Linux (& Mac, & Solaris, etc), doesn't worsen Australia's balance of trade... what else...? I'm sure there must be something.." One of many office products that support the ISO standard open document format - which to me is pretty important. |
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