Interesting little tidbit:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061120-8256.html

Thought I'd share

I own legal copies of Office 2000 Pro and Office XP, among other MS products, and actually have Office 2000 Pro installed, cause I don't like Office XP. That said, it's my intent, given the serious interface redesign in Office 2007, to switch full-time over to Open Office when Office 2000 is no longer viable to use.

I've already switched over to NeoOffice on the Mac, cause Office 2004 is not going to get a Universal Binary, and as a result has to run in emulation mode on Intel based Macs, and there seems to be little to nothing in Microsoft Office that is not available in Open Office. (NeoOffice is Open Office with Mac Centric interface stuff worked in there).

This "Kill Switch" thing may not be new, but it's another reason why I am so torqued off at Microsoft. It's just that big corporate mentality thing, I guess, at least in part, that is so unappealing.

That will do it for me. I have always used the Office products even at the high cost, for my kids to to use for school. Next time around it's Open Office for me too.

Yay!

Microsoft builds Kill Switch into all new products!

I'm all for Large Corporations committing Suicide.

That's not corporate suicide - they will probably get away with it. Most people find it easier to just go along with things instead of putting up a fight, unless it is a huge moral or personal issue. This may be neither for many.

I really don't care. There are more choices than Microsoft Office if you are not satisfied with it. Get OpenOffice or something else.

From what I can see, the new file formats Office 2007 uses will likely be more of a headache for users than the interface, particularly with Word saving documents in the new .docx format. After trying out the beta for a few weeks, I have finally got the hang of its tabbed toolbar interface, but one thing that has already caused problems is me accidentally saving documents in the new .docx format and not being able to open them on another PC, since these cannot be opened with Office 2003 or any earlier version.

As a result, I am back to using Word XP again. So far, I have not seen anyone complain about a lack a features in Word 2000, never mind Word XP and can barely remember the benefits of using the 2003 version. At work, we use a mixture of Microsoft Office 2000-XP and OpenOffice. So far, apart from poor calculation performance in OpenOffice Calc (its equivalent to MS Excel) and no Access alternative that works with MS Access databases, I have not seen anyone complain about missing features in its Word, Excel & PowerPoint alternatives despite Microsoft’s recent campaign of trying to show off why its Office suite is better than OpenOffice.

When it comes to businesses, I do believe that they should be using legal software, but as OpenOffice is a legal free alternative, Microsoft will need to watch out, as unlike Linux vs. Windows, anyone who is familiar with Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint will get the hang of OpenOffice's alternatives in a very short period of time. On the other hand, Microsoft’s Retail Office suite pricing is seriously overpriced when it comes to expecting home users to pay for it. For example, many students learning to use Microsoft office (particularly Access) like to have it at home to practice on and many of these would not justify spending €600 (typical price in Ireland) for the retail professional version just to be able to work on their assignments on Microsoft Access (which the Students & Teachers edition lacks).

Try Atlantis Office, it's a 7Mb installer only, compatible with MS Word, etc. (.rtf), very nice and light.