Tom,

Your experience with Office 2000 matches mine, except I HAD the CD. But, the constant asking for it caused me to become concerned that it would become damaged by scratches or even broken in the shuffle. (How many "favorite" music CDs are now unusable or damaged? Computer CDs are even more sensitive to damage.) And the very idea of their draconian assumption of guilt causing them to punish the innocent just in case ... drove me to Open Office. Again Microsoft unwittingly drove people to open software.

It seems a lot of people either become obedient servants, pulling their forelock and bowing to their lord MSFT, or they join "the rebellion" of Open Source. Of course there is that middle ground who are not slavishly obedient, cursing their master, but not quite willing to leave his "protection." But such unwitting actions by MSFT keeps driving people out of that middle ground.

In history we find many "leaders of a rebellion" who, once the old overlord is deposed or they carve out their own dominion, suddenly tell their followers, "If you think the old overlord was draconian, I am Draco!"

Such seems to have been the history of MSFT. In the early days they were viewed as a champion of the little guy. That has not been so for a long time now.

I not only use Open Office, I recommend it to everyone I know because it does all they need to do, does not keep hammering legitimate users for their CD, installs all the features when told to do all (unlike MSFT where all, all, and all all is not all) and has a real good price! And it is available for all platforms of significance.

I am betting that .NET will come up with things to keep Open Office from being used with a .NET application. Such would be yet another attempt to squash rebellion that would move some of the "unruly but not rebellious" from the uncommitted middle into the "open" rebellion.


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I have done a lot of automation reading backend Oracle data and pushing upwards of 1,000,000 rows of data directly into an Excel PivotCache object using VFP to control the process. At home I had Office 2000 Professional installed on my personal notebook. About a year or two ago I kept getting very irratating notices to install an upgrade feature and if I did not then Excel or Word would immediately shut down.

Since the time I installed my legit copy of Office on my notebook I rebuilt my basement and in the interim lost my Office CD. That CD was required to install the upgrade feature (whatever that was) so I could use the fundamentals of Excel at the time.

After getting very irratated at the process - I uninstalled Office 2000 and installed the free Open Office Org product and have not looked back. I used that same product for my sister's kids in school when they wanted to have Office installed - Open Office works great for them for their High School projects.

See http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~MakingEveryFoxCount for how this approach can save you thousands of dollars. After all there is nothing new to add in Fox (perhaps that is true) and if it is then clearly there is nothing new or not much new to add to Word, PowerPoint or even Excel.

In the end I am no longer a user of MS Office wittingly or not...

>>>>Tom:
>>>
>>>
>>>>They say bad news always comes in threes, and for loyal developer groups that could be the case. When Visual Basic 6 is fully retired
>>>>
>>>>The infamous "third shoe" actually already dropped: J# is officially slated for retirement. So, maybe there's a new policy change at MS: "Bad news from now on will come in fours." 8-[
>>
>>>Sounds like a horse, completely unshod :).
>
>>Or a programmer, left without tools, crawling towards open source... ;-)
>
>Or unwittingly driven to open source?