Hannush Web Blog

While it is sad to see people lose jobs, it is very interesting to watch the open source community work its magic on slowly dissolving the Microsoft stranglehold on the PC market.

Earlier this year it was discussed that Internet Explorer might start fading into the sunset.  Then Microsoft jumped out of the Analytics market.  Now they are announcing that the online service and software encyclopedia  Encarta is about to bite the dust.  Apparently the open source Wikipedia, which Google and Yahoo! have shown great favor to, has completely eroded interest in the pay for Encarta.  While Wikipedia is not perfect, it does have an immense amount of articles on a great variety of subjects.  With millions of writers, it would be hard for Microsoft to compete.  And so they are choosing not to.

What’s next?  With IBM looking to buy Sun Microsystems the free OpenOffice suite could get some powerful backing to help push Microsoft Office out of some businesses.  While I wouldn’t expect OpenOffice to completely erode Microsoft Office sales, not having to deal with all of those nasty licence fees sure will sound good to many companies that are in a pinch financially.

If you haven’t tried OpenOffice, it might be worth a download.  I have used it for 4 years now exclusively.  While Microsoft did make life tough for a while when they introduced their new XML DocX files, OpenOffice3 has started to catch up to this…and Microsoft does offer a Word Viewer that will allow you to view and copy DocX files.  It saves me $1200 every 3 years…not too shabby.

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