TooMuchGreen

Due to an increase in project work lately I’ve had to review and produce various bits of documentation sent to me in MS Word format, and nice as iWork 09 is (and it IS nice) you have to face it that the two still aren’t 100% compatible regarding the finer points of formatting (very close, but just not 100%), so, last week I gave the groovy little MacBook Air the shock of it’s iLife by by installing MS Word on it just to see how it compared to the open source offerings, I should have known better, from the *word* go it just didn’t feel right.

Firstly you’ve got the general size of the app itself, bloated is an understatement, not only that but after install it decides it wants to update it’s updater (?) then proceeds to hog all your bandwidth by downloading the actual SP update itself, which at 180mb is certainly some service pack (indeed, and some).

Anyhow, I installed it and despatched the documentation off in both Word and PDF format (I love PDF’s, but that’s another story, ask me about archive Digitisation formats sometime), and as it all went OK I decided to have a butchers around Entourage too, just out of curiosity, and just to see how the other half lives (as you do), I fired up the .DMG and tried to add it to the installed packages, but it didn’t want to know, nope, not playing at all. It seems if you do a selective install of only certain packages and upgrade to the latest service pack you’re snookered for adding the remainder as they’re seen to be from an older version of Office (which I suppose they now are of course), there’s no way round it other than to de-install, sift through and manually remove all the operating system and preference entries (a laboriously challenging job in itself) and run through the whole process again (complete with huge service pack download to update), hmm….no, I don’t think so, Neo Office it is then.

Neo Office is an evolved version of the superb open source office suite “Open Office“, it’s ported and tuned for the Macs (OSX), is free to download and drops in substantially smaller than the service pack alone for Mac Office 2008. It offers true and seamless cross compatibility and if you don’t use it you honestly must be some sort of retard, seriously, why on earth anyone would shell out $250+ on a piece of software which does exactly the same as a similar application which you can download for free is beyond me (I’ve even seen Mac Office 2008 listed at $499, come on now, you really HAVE to be kidding here people).

Once again it’s merely down to monopolistic marketing and fear of the unknown, imagine the cost savings gained throughout all our schools and hospitals if each computer ran an Ubuntu desktop operating system with an accompanying open source office suite, even with *educational discount* you’re negating license costs of at least $200 per unit, money which could be re-purposed into infrastructure and service upgrades rather than lining the pockets of a presently self perpetuating monster who seems aggressively intent on extending its global dominance through forced software upgrades and extortionately priced software, software which as oppose to being intuitive is convoluted to use and without adequate patching (at further cost) is no more than a frustratingly unstable and dangerous security risk rather than the enabler it professes to be.

There shouldn’t even be a considered choice here for anyone with at least half a brain. Ubuntu is a free and uber stable operating system for your computer, Mozilla offer their Firefox web browser and superb Thunderbird e-mail client also for free, couple both with the free Open Office suite and you have a robust, scalable and inherently secure platform for any and all variations of enterprise I.T, and all for nothing.