🚀 go-pugleaf

On 01 Oct 1998 11:53:39 +0100, Dunstan_Vavasour
<Dunstan_Vavasour@cegelecproj.co.uk> wrote:

>Jason Clifford <jason@dlsl.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
>> In article <907103252snz@vision25.demon.co.uk>, Phil Hunt
>> <philh@vision25.demon.co.uk> writes
>> >> Old or superceded does not equate to useless.
>> >
>> >Microsoft's entire business strategy is based on making old software
>> >useless, so you have to buy newer software (from them of course).
>> 
>> Microsoft's business strategy does not render older software useless.
>> Their stragety is to affect public perception so that people believe
>> that they MUST have the latest release.
>
>What they do is keep changing the internal formats so that old
>versions quickly become unuseable. Although it is possible to keep
>documents in previous formats, somebody non technical running MS Word 98
>will (by default) save their documents in a format which is unreadable
>by previous versions.
>
>The following conversation then follows
>
>"I can't read Doris's document"
>
>"Ah, she's on Word 98"
>
>"I need Word 98 too then"
>
>A lot of Microsoft's profits depend on this cycle of unenforced but 
>de facto obsolescence. And this is the cycle that corporate IT mangers
>should be desperate to get out of.
>
>
no question.

I've kept my office using Word 6.something for the last four years,
and it's just fine.  I just got a new computer, and Word97 came with
it.  I'm happy to ignore it, but curiosity has its pull.  Plus, I use
the MSOffice toolbar, and after a nasty system crash, when I got the
machine back up, the Word6 toolbar icon now invokes Word97.  Winblows
98 won't let me change that.  I had to kludge a workaround.

This is why I'm switching to linux.  First, I've installed it on my
machine.  When I acquire enough knowledge about it to make me
comfortable, I'm going to delete winblows from my home machine and
make it linux only.  Then I'm going to install it on all the other
machines, using windows only for applications I can't do business
without, until replacements in linux come along.

Short term, this is going to take a lot of time and probably cost me
money, not to mention frustration and all.  Long term, I think it's
the right move.