I have a pet peeve – compatibility. I hate when a computer user cannot work together with others in a workgroup because his/her hardware or software is incompatible with the others.

Now this is one of the first questions people ask me whenever Linux pops into the conversation: “Does it work with WIndows? Is it compatible? Can you open documents sent by Windows users?”

Yes, yes and yes. There is however a flipside – when Windows computers do not work together with Windows computers.

I ran into this while at a client’s this week. One of them had some mails that she wanted to send to a colleague – they were a lot (about 100) so she backed them up to a .pst file and passed the file to her colleague to import.

HAH!

Her version of Outlook created a .pst that was incompatible with the version of Outlook TWO of her colleagues where using! In fact, between the three of them involved they ran three different versions of Office, and a whole lot of incompatibility issues cropped up.

One of them had Office 2007 – a new Laptop (downgraded to XP) was bought – and this user had to specifically save his documents in .doc format or the other office users would not be able to open them. One of them had Vista, and a whole bunch of issues cropped up there – she was not able to properly use the office network printer (driver disk simply refused to run on her machine), she could not use files shared on the File server (Vista seems to be unable to access Linux fileserver shares by design) and a lot of the software they used in-office that they had licenses for needed to be re-bought in Vista compatible versions in order to allow her to work.

Incidentally the Laptop running Vista was one of the highest specced machines in the office, yet the user had a “Downgraded Windows Experience” because the hardware had an “Unrated Performance Rating.”

And people wonder why I decided to dump Microsoft software and head for the free world. When I potentially have no more control over MY mails and MY documents and MY spreadsheets there is a problem. Why does Microsoft have the apparent right to lock in my property by dropping support for the format I paid them to use?

That is an unfair business model. The safe road would be to eschew the Microsoft office suite alltogether and go for OpenOffice and Thunderbird/Evolution. That way you can be sure that your documents will stay yours in the long run.

And what about the newfangled .docx format? Will OpenOffice be able to open documents and spreadsheets saved in this format? Presently no – and neither does anything other than MS Office 2007. And I have a sneaky feeling that Microsoft will not support .docx in anything BUT their newest office suite – so again OpenOffice will be the safer bet for future backwards and forwards compatibility.

So keep your property yours – Go Opensource.

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