I admit to being one of those geeks that has done his fair share of Microsoft bashing over the years. Promoting Linux and OpenOffice over the expensive, locked down, Microsoft equivalents. But the landscape appears to be changing. I say this for a couple of reasons. Firstly is the battle in the office suite arena. Microsoft Office has, for many years, been the market leader but maybe they should be thanking the software pirates for its popularity. I say this because I believe that if Microsoft had had the copy protection that it has now, back in the mid 90's. And every copy had to be purchased at around $300 per workstation then it would not be so widespread today.
A business faced with the bill for putting MS Office on a large office's numerous workstations may have looked for cheaper alternatives. But back in the 90's buying one copy and just putting it on multiple computers was commonplace. Also, it was common practice for employees to get a copy of the office CD to take home. There was no authentication, registering it over the Internet, so who knew?
Now it is is a different story as Microsoft locked things down starting with Office 2000. As new versions came out, prices stayed high, but companies found that they were now stuck in Microsoft's pocket, everyone else was using it so they had to comply.
Then came OpenOffice, a free alternative that could read the Microsoft document format and do, pretty much, all that the big leader could do. Several government agencies and schools started to wonder why they were spending tens of thousands of dollars on MS Office when there was this free alternative. I believe Microsoft has felt the impact of this, especially in this economic downturn. So finally, we are seeing better pricing, at least on the home front. Recently, I have seen MS Office 2007 Home and Student edition available for less that $100 and this is for 3 computers. This is a much more attractive proposition for the home user who has multiple computers. Even I would be tempted if it wasn't for the fact that I have never sat in front of OpenOffice and wished for some feature that MS Office had that OpenOffice didn't.
Secondly, there is Windows itself. Microsoft took a hit with Vista and although many of the issues that plagued the operating system in the beginning have now been solved it is still the black sheep of the family. Many users are staying with XP and some have even bailed altogether and moved over to the Mac or Linux. XP is looking old and users need the next generation, and here comes Windows 7. Microsoft has made some interesting decisions here, allowing it to be downloaded and used for free. So millions of regular computer users could beta test the software before its official release. Thus discovering and fixing the compatibility issues before the operating system comes out. They have also been offering some really good pre-release pricing. Personally I have Windows 7 loaded on my laptop and netbook and love it. I ordered it as soon as I could, getting the pre-release price of only $99 for the professional version upgrade. I wanted this over the home edition as it offers the ability to be a remote host.
So now I'm wondering that if this trend continues I'll become a Microsoft fan again? I'm certainly doing less bashing than I used to.
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