christof's blog

Another Step to Loosen Microsoft's Grip

I must admit, that I am a lazy mainstream user - such as many other people, too - when it comes to selecting desktop software, and therefore used Microsoft's product often and convinced: "no experiments". According to my technology adoption behavior, Geoff Moore would certainly classify me somewhere in the early or even conservative majority.
Now, there should be some worries for Microsoft given the fact that I switched with another key software platform away from Redmond's products: Firefox turns out to be a much better web browser (tabbed, faster loading, less errors, etc.)
The decision was taken after I had used Firefox in a Laotian Internet Cafe. First I was looking for IE, because I thought that Outlook Web Access would work better with it, but then it turned out that Firefox worked similarly good. The last decisive step was the fact, that I couldn't access my Bank of America homebanking anymore with IE after they had introduced some fancy security features - but with Firefox I could.
In 2004, I had already switched from MS Office to OpenOffice - but so far only partly: For documents I use OpenOffice and am, in general, happy, unless it comes to more complex formatting tasks (such as our sales collateral). This is because documents have become much less important in our web-based business conduct - so much is done by mail, who bothers to write letters any more? For Excel (and PowerPoint, which I try to use less and less), I still rely on MSFT, since OO didn't convince me so far.
On many other product platforms, I was totally lost for Microsoft from the beginning. Hotmail, Messenger and everything with Passport was a total red-flag zone for me. For enterprise applications, I am very happy with on-demand products such as Salesforce.com (though a bit pricy). I'm also not a gamer, so I won't spend money on an XBox. And don't mention Microsoft search...
Give us another year, and perhaps I switch to Linux desktop (with a Windows VM from VMware for certain moments...), drop Excel in favor of OO, and switch Outlook (which I would love to do since I am rather unhappy with the stability and the very limited search and archiving functionality) to - I don't know - Scalix? -- and MSFT would be entirely replaced by Open Source and/or On-Demand Software.
Isn't this quite a big change?

posted by Christof Wittig @ 5:33 AM