Plea for help: The detriment of using Microsoft products
John Chambers
jc at trillian.mit.edu
Mon May 15 15:53:11 EDT 2000
Jeff remarked:
On a related note, when we ran the LBS, I was amazed at the number
of people who wanted to see how to do stuff on Linux, as in editing
Word Documents, Excel Documents, etc, but didn't seem to care about
interoperability with Windows. In fact, it was more on the order of
"how do I do this without Microsoft?" Admittedly, anyone at the
Linux Business Show probably was looking for alternatives anyway,
but the clear message I got was that whatever replaced current
Microsoft stuff, they didn't want it from Microsoft.
Yeah; that's understandable, considering the problems that MS users
have even doing something like reading a Word doc on a different
version of Word than it came from. I've occasionally responded to
complaints like this by saying something like "Hey, y'know, I
routinely see files that originated on Unix systems 10, 15, or even
20 years ago, and I never seem to have any trouble reading them."
This sometimes produces some thoughtful looks. With enough of this
sort of subversion, we might eventually educate at least some people
to the idea that quality software is a remote possibility.
Which reminds me: I just got a significant doc in Word format, and
when I printed it on my wife's W98 machine, parts came out garbled
and funny looking. I've heard a rumor that there was a Word that ran
on linux, or maybe that there would be Real Soon Now. Is this just a
rumor, or is it available somewhere? It might be fun if we could tell
people "Well, Microsoft's Word can't handle documents from 6 months
ago, but linux's version of Word can."
Thought for today: There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know w
hat you're talking
about.
-- John von Neumann
Great quote. Where'd you find it?
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