Monopolies

On to the other post I was going to do - The Microsoft Monopoly. As you would very well know, Microsoft has a monopoly on practically everything PC based, from the OS to the office suite to the browser. This monopoly is to the extent that the average person doesn't realise alternatives exist. "What's this new Firefox thing that you installed, and where did you put the desktop icon for my internet (the one with the blue e)?"

This next story comes from my Physics class a couple of weeks ago. We had to electronically submit a draft of our assignment for our teacher to mark. The school avidly follows the Microsoft trends, having lately rolled out to all staff a tablet laptop with Windows Vista and Office 2007. Basically, as I wrote it up on my Ubuntu machine in OpenOffice, I realised that the teacher wouldn't want to be trying to open my ODT file, and will complain to me the next day. So in the end I had to save it as a doc file.

The time we had to submit the final report, one person submitted a RAR archive, which he complained he couldn't open. I thought: hmm... he really is the sort of person that doesn't know anything about file extensions. There's no chance he'd have ever worked out what an ODT was.

Lesson here is: Don't conform to Microsoft's monopoly. If you need to give a file to someone, and you're making the file in an open, non-Microsoft way (e.g. using OOo), then send them the OOo file and let them deal with not being able to open it (hopefully they know something about file extensions, and it's unimportant enough that you can afford to rant at them like so - "You can afford to buy Microsoft's Office suite and save all your files in closed standards, assuming that everyone else has Office, but you can't even use free and open, cross-platform software to read my file, which is compliant to open and publicly accessible standards... etc.").

That's the day's rant from your humble open-source advocate.