1) As a business man I do not hold making a profit against anyone. In fact I highly encourage others to make profits and lots of em too. The more money MS makes the more they spend and contrary to popular belief it does trickle down to folks like me.
2) As a business owner, I have no real privacy and have filled out so many credit applications, product registrations, and vender registrations it would completely ridiculous to think changing software would afford me any level of privacy. If you want privacy, being a contractor is not for you. Hey if you want a free Greenlee hat you have to give up some more privacy and there is a whole three of guys here waiting for their hat to come in.
3) I probably own somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000 in software, all of which is either Windows based or in the case of Timberline is only supported in Windows. Quite of bit of software in business is very proprietary, and I am not talking about Word and Excel, which would mean making a swap to a open system cause a lot more problems than it would claim to solve.
4) You probably don’t remember what computers were like Pre-Microsoft, but I do. Something as simple as printing was near impossible with out real technical help, and once you had it all set up, you did not change anything unless you had too. Installing any kind of hardware was a real pain the butt that took technical skill. Then one day the big hairy ape called Micro Soft came along and established protocols and way for people like me to install a printer that not only worked by work correctly the first time, and if printer manufactures wanted there equipment to work on a MS box there was a way to make it happen and the big hairy ape to show them how it was to be done, and everyone complied and their was much rejoicing.
That is the real point here MS is the big hairy ape that everyone uses and most everyone’s standards comply with. Even the open source stuff you tout complies with Microsoft’s standards for doc and xls files and every piece of hardware you could ever want to buy complies with MS. From a business point of view why would you want more than one standard to comply with? If a program or a piece of hardware does not support Windows, I wont but it.
5) Open Office is not just like Word and Excel, and there is a learning curve. Why would you want to retrain competent employee, in short if it aint broken don’t fix it.
6) Share Point, just saying that alone should be enough of an explanation but if you don’t know what it is, then let me just add this it is one of the most powerful, scale able, customizable, project management tools I have ever used. There is one caveat, it only runs on windows and is only compatible with MS office. Using MS office is a small price to pay for using it.
7) Mozzilla/Firefox is just plain awesome, and I use it almost exclusively. If it did not support windows, guess what….almost nobody would use it. Even the free cool stuff has to play by the big hairy apes rules and that is fine by me, because it works.
8) Active-x has a switch you know, you can turn it off, and there is a lot to be said for a good firewall.
Just my 2 cents, I use computers at work to make money and there is no point in re-inventing the wheel to save $150.
