Microsoft Unbundles Software For NY City 131
doishmere writes "Microsoft has agreed to sell individual pieces of software to NY City workers, rather than forcing each seat to buy a full suite of software. The city has created three classes of users based on which pieces of software they need to perform their job, and Microsoft will sell software packages tailored to each class at a reduced price."
The Key Is (Score:4, Insightful)
Getting money for something someone else has done. The NYC employees uses a Mac or LibreOffice, it matters not, Microsoft still collects.
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Getting money for something someone else has done. The NYC employees uses a Mac or LibreOffice, it matters not, Microsoft still collects.
Paradoxically, NY city "saves" 50 mils in 5 years. WTF?
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Microsoft has Mac products (whether they suck or not), but everyone I know runs the Windows versions in Parallels anyway. At any rate I doubt NYC has many Macs in use.
OpenOffice is, frankly, garbage. LibreOffice I haven't used, but is still in beta with only a few 100k downloads so I doubt it's been deployed in a large city.
Microsoft's Office software is actually pretty good and, yes, I would buy a closed-source linux version if they sold it. For the moment I use Crossover Office which, although somewhat er
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You know that you can run Microsoft Office 2007 in Wine, right? It works very well and I have never had any problems with it on Linux. You just have to install a few extra things, but thats fairly easy with wine-tricks. I do a fair amount of things in it for school.
I haven't tried Microsoft Office 2010 yet though, so its hard for me to say if it works or not.
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Crossover Office is wine, except they take care of everything for you for a relatively small price. (It takes me less time to earn the $ to pay for cxoffice than to get wine working on even one tricky software.)
Since cxoffice is a legit contributor to wine I'm even supporting open source at the same time.
Thanks for the pointer about wine-tricks though, always good to know alternatives.
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OpenOffice is, frankly, garbage. LibreOffice I haven't used, but is still in beta with only a few 100k downloads so I doubt it's been deployed in a large city.
Really? How long did you use it? I've been using it for several years and have had less problems with it than with MS Office. Even my non-computer savvy wife used it for several years writing term papers and book reports for her masters degree. Your follow up statement about LibreOffice tells me you don't know that much about either OpenOffice or LibreOffice. They are one in the same - OpenOffice became LibreOffice after it split from under Oracle(nee Sun)'s wing.
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I've used it plenty. I have memories of when OpenOffice was good, and this seems to be backed up by many people. On the other hand, maybe my standards just improved or, more likely, Microsoft and Apple have actually improved their stuff while OpenOffice is still bloating up their clone of Office 97 or whatever.
I just downloaded LibreOffice after replying to this post (note: when you have something that actually works, like Microsoft Office, you don't have to bother trying every "new" office suite in the hop
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Then you would be wrong. I can't give you a rigorous definition but despite years of experience with OpenOffice.org, after just a few hours I found the Microsoft Ribbon to be better 95% of the time (here's a clue: what matters is for the usual stuff be easily accessible). This isn't to say the Ribbon is the only way, or even the best, but yeah it's a lot better than the 23 tabs, 3 rows deep, of dialog box that OO.o throws at me. I'm happy to give experimental and promising stuff several hours of learning cu
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OpenOffice is, frankly, garbage.
Care to elaborate?
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Slow. Unstable. Ugly. Inconsistent (try saving a complex OOImpress document as a PDF). Rife with internecine politics.
Hopefully LibreOffice fixes some of this. It'll still be ugly, but the rest may be fixed and that might be enough.
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Only in the schools. (There are only about 1,600 of those.)
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And is the NYC Department of Education paying for Microsoft Office for those computers and not using it?
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Shouldn't they have been doing this (Score:1)
In the first place?
I mean, the fact that Microsoft was forcing software bundles on the city seems very sneaky and underhanded. Usually when you're dealing with that big of a client, you're cutting them the deal, not the other way around.
Also, as much as I love Windows, there is no reason that organizations looking to save money should not be using OpenOffice or one of its variants.
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I'm old enough to remember when Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Project, Visio, and whatever else MS is bundling these days as "Office" were simply separate products, which anyone could buy individually. "Microsoft Office" was just a less expensive way to get a bunch of them together. They were put together to leverage the more popular apps in the package, to entice (and then lock) users into using the less successful ones. The idea was to cut into (for example) WordPerfect sales by giving pe
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I'm old enough to remember when Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Project, Visio, and whatever else MS is bundling these days as "Office" were simply separate products, which anyone could buy individually.
You still can buy them separately. I was just looking at a pricelist earlier today that showed Word, Excel, Outlook and Access as individual items. If you wanted more than one product then you were much better off buying the cheapest Office package.
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And what does Microsoft get out of this? (Score:2)
Maybe free hot dogs from NY street vendors for their employees. This would definitely be a mission for these guys: http://improveverywhere.com/ [improveverywhere.com]
Armies of folks converge somewhere in NYC, wearing Microsoft T-Shirts, and demand their free hot dogs. And then disappear.
Actually, the trick would probably work better if the folks had iPhone / IPad / iWhatever T-Shirts . . .
An old NYC saying says, "A hot dog vendor, and his hot dog, are not easily parted . . . without a cash payment, or a bare knuckles fist
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Perhaps the city threatened to migrate some departments away from Microsoft -- like, for example, the computers that are used in the city's school system? I bet that would have gotten Microsoft to start begging.
Too late. (Unless you're talking about the computers in the school offices? Yeah, we're all on Win XP / Office 2007.)
Conveniently unbundles... and rebundled. (Score:2)
Wait... so they "unbundled" the Office Suite and recreated 3 new bundles costing on average $500 per person? That's the same price as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, and Publisher bundled together as Office Professional 2010 without a bulk institutional discount!
What a deal!
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If this includes developer tools, Exchange, AD, etc, then 500 per person average sounds about right.
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Curiously absent... (Score:2)
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The fact that when you open an MS word document and do any editing it fucks it up for everyone else is one reason. One of our meetings went like this
"Who uses open office?"
"silence"
Poor New Yorkers! (Score:2, Flamebait)
They will slowly be strangled by those closed [proprietary] Microsoft Office formats.
It's document editing and email...for now. What Microsoft will do is to wait for another administration then 'sweeten' the deal. Slowly, Powerpoint, Excel, and all the rest will come into the fold. Then...
Guess what! They will be hooked to the extent that thinking of another alternative will be too expensive a proposition.
Time will tell...but I am almost sure New Yorkers have not seen nothing yet.
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Anyway Openoffice solved the problem. There are features that open office does not have, like collaboration, is han
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$50Million buys a lot of Development (Score:1)
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I keep seeing all these large migrations from Office?
You do? ::whiplash-look-around-wildly:: Where?!
Does this mean they have to do this for the feds? (Score:3, Interesting)
GAO contracts usually have a "most favored customer" clause, meaning that any better offer to another customer is automatically offered to the federal government. I wonder that such terms apply in this case.
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It would... but that would also depend on Microsoft being a Direct GAO Vendor.
Not saying that they aren't... but my gut tells me that some distributor(s) that is(are) able to resell volume licences is more likely the one on a GAO Contract.
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Not enough to have "Microserfs" anymore... (Score:1)
Now they're trying to foist the idea of a caste system on the rest of the poor sods out there stuck using Windows (not just the ones working at Microsoft) because of idiotic decisions on workplace IT policies made by people who don't end up having to support and implement what ends up being purchased. Or those IT heads incompetent enough to still keep continuing to promote using any Microsoft software.
I've maintained for several years now that the above point is the main reason that Windows, Office and Se
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I've maintained for several years now that the above point is the main reason that Windows, Office and Server are pretty much the only thing keeping Microsoft solvent, as those three divisions' continuing success mainly hinges on the applied wisdom of decision making by the heads of educational, corporate and government institutions regarding technical matters (or rather the complete lack thereof) rather than Microsoft making any discernable effort regarding the quality of the products and services they provide...
Those 3 divisions the only things keeping MS solvent? From what I can tell by looking at earnings reports, those 3 divisions are about 90% of the company. I think most companies would be happy that 90% of the business lines are solidly profitable.
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Office and Server are pretty much the only thing keeping Microsoft solvent, as those three divisions' continuing success mainly hinges on the applied wisdom of decision making by the heads of educational, corporate and government institutions regarding technical matters (or rather the complete lack thereof)
Their entertainment division (mainly because of the Xbox, although other things (like Zune) get run out of there) is profitable and doesn't rely in institutional purchasers at all.
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Their entertainment division (mainly because of the Xbox, although other things (like Zune) get run out of there) is profitable and doesn't rely in institutional purchasers at all.
You caught me, you're right. Rather you're half-right.
I forgot they merged the entertainment with the devices in 2005 to help bury the fact that the XBox 360 still takes a loss on every console sold, although how much is a matter of some debate in the industry.
So while the mobile devices side of the entertainment division fence makes money, the 360 and the Zune are basically write-offs.
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The merging of entertainment and "mobile devices" was to make mobile devices more profitable, not the Xbox. What mobile devices makes Microsoft money? The Kin?
a broader set of applications (Score:2)
What `broader set of applications' does MS offer that NYC needs to do its work?
Re:Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
It's impressive that you typed that well thought out post (your first post, no less!) all in one minute after the story was made public, despite lack of a subscriber account. It's almost like you knew beforehand that this story was going to appear and wanted to get some pro MS sentiment in before anyone else had a chance to say anything..! How much were you paid for that, exactly?
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and it's what everyone uses in lower division college courses
Really? I see Eclipse all over the place. Maybe I have not look around enough though...
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Really? I had to use vi through a remote terminal. But I think my professor may have been a sadist.
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Really? I had to use vi through a remote terminal. But I think my professor may have been a sadist.
You say it likes it a bad thing, that's how I work everyday.
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For what it's worth, we used both for different courses at my Uni.
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The use of an IDE in a college is decided first and foremost by which language/platform they use to teach, and that typically depends on the local IT job market - there are places where Java is on top, and there are places where .NET is on top, even within the same country (like US).
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
Well, at least he's right about Visual Studio(as far as Windows is concerned). The fact that the Express version is free AND comes with a free implementation of MSSQL only cements it in because it is the entry point, it's free, and it's what everyone uses in lower division college courses. No better way to lock in your market
This is why they made Marijuana Illegal.
- Dan.
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Hmm.. Jdeveloper (from Oracle) is free as is Eclipse and NetBeans, and not just the crippled versions. The super-duper versions are free, too. Oracle XE is free as well, along with MySQL and PostgreSQL. There are other alternatives to Microsoft when it comes to free software. Most of the others don't have strings attached, too.
Disclamer: I do not work for Oracle. I wasn't paid by anybody to say this. Hell, I wish I was - I could use the extra cash.
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Depends. Are you posting comments praising it that are unrelated to the topic?
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No. Microsoft giving customers a reasonably well packaged offering is the news item.
If you want to praise someone for this you ought to praise the existence of macs, linux, openoffice.
Nah its not us (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish Linux and openoffice had been the motivator. Google Apps and gmail
is to be given credit for this one. Microsoft is scared s--tless of google apps because
its catching on in the enterprise where Microsoft's bread and butter is. If
lower tier workers can use google and google apps for 90% of their work then their bosses
will figure out how to shift the other 10% on to others. It also deprives them of revenue
from Outlook when google hosts email on their servers.
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why do politicians insist on buying the $400 toilet seats? oh thats right they get their pockets lined with politico bucks from the businesses they buy from
(in case there are a few dense politicos and other liberals that don't understand the simile --- Micro$hit is the electronic toilet seat makers of the 21st century)
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The first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one.
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I like Visual Studio too, what difference does it make. This guy is going far beyond "I like Visual Studio", it reads like a psychopath trying to get someone to sleep with him. That account is brand new, has only one post, and he would have to be a very organised thinker as well as a rather hyperactive typer to get all of that out in a maximum of two minutes after the story appeared. It all seemed a bit too orchestrated to me.
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I like Windows and Visual Studio as well does that make me a shill too?
Yes. At least, according to some - I can't find it now, but I recall a thread with one person who basically insisted that if you're speaking favorably of "M$", you are a shill. By itself this is not unexpected - there are zealots everywhere - but a disturbingly large number of people spoke up to agree with him (in addition to the +5 insightful mod).
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Hopefully a lot. That makes his comment being modded -1 Troll all the more funny.
Good job calling him out on it :)
Not astroturfer, but troll (Score:2)
He's not an astroturfer, he's a troll.
First of all look at the misnamed product:
Windows Mobile 7,
It's Windows Phone 7 (and a big step backwards from any WinMo products, but that's beside the point)
Next, he disses "cloud computing:"
storing company data "in the cloud" is not a good idea.
Not what a company selling cloud computing products (such as a "cloud" email server off the top of my head, IIRC they also have a Google Apps clone) would do.
And finally, he winks at anyone who knows how to recognize a troll post:
made me horny over a computer equipment.
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It doesn't matter. It's a brand new account, and that is his only post, ever. I really doubt that account has a subscription. Chances of it all being a coincidence seem rather low to me.
Clippy says: (Score:4, Funny)
It looks like you're shilling for Microsoft. Would you like to:
* Talk about how Microsoft solutions are enterprise ready
* Bash Google and/or Apple for no apparent reason
* Mention the hidden costs of open source
* Cleverly forget to mention Microsoft disasters such as Bob, the Zune, Windows Mobile, or Vista
The mods must be smoking crack (Score:2)
Re:Clippy says: (Score:5, Funny)
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Add in the world wide help to seek out dissidents.
Back in the US is just about lockin and cost savings
Re:Clippy says: (Score:4, Interesting)
It looks like you're shilling for Microsoft. Would you like to:
* Talk about how Microsoft solutions are enterprise ready
* Bash Google and/or Apple for no apparent reason
* Mention the hidden costs of open source
* Cleverly forget to mention Microsoft disasters such as Bob, the Zune, Windows Mobile, or Vista
Just once I would like to see a +5 accusation of shilling include a solid rebuttal.
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My favorite in this category is still the disaster that TradeElect [computerworld.com] was. Remember all the marketing / ads that were run with this saying LSE decided to use SQLServer? Wonder why they did not do the same when the whole thing went down the crapper and the whole platform got dumped.
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They must have used the MS data exporting tools while your former employer probably used some trhird party tools. Or your employer didn't need to translate string encodings.
On itself MS SQL ins't that bad. Just the tools that come with it (and .NET) that make it perform badly.
Re:Clippy says: (Score:5, Insightful)
We have seen how this company operates over many years.
Saying something nice is fine, posting an obvious premade shill piece is not.
Re:Clippy says: (Score:4, Insightful)
That's actually a really good point. I suspect there may be a correlation between age and views about MS. In fact, I'm sure that luring in young developers (counting on them not knowing MS history) is on their agenda.
Over the past 15 years, I've gone from pro-MS to agnostic to "avoid when possible" based largely on their behavior. But young developers don't know about DR-DOS, Netscape, MS JVM, or even the recent OOXML fiasco. So for those that don't understand the reasons for the seemingly automatic negative responses, a single action doesn't eclipse an entire history or even come close to meaning that they've "changed" as the shill put it.
If MS wants to gain respect, they've got to consistently play nice. That means supporting standards instead of trying to own them. That means playing nice instead of trying to lock out competitors with their monopolies. But I really can't see this happening unless they are broken up or they lose enough market share so that they're forced to compete on merit. They're too addicted to their current business of locking in customers and leveraging their monopolies.
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Not me. Over the past 30 years, I've gone from pro-MS to agnostic to "avoid when possible" based largely on their software. I just don't like being forced to do things "the Microsoft way". I don't like the way they change stuff from version to version for no apparent reason. I don't like the planned obsolescence. I don't like the way they handle security.
I do like Excel -- or at least, I liked Excel 2000. Not so happy about 2003 or 2007, but Excel is still better from other spreadsheets I've tried. But that
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Ah, yes, the "MS can't change because /. readers bash it for its history of, shall we say, less than ethical behavior" argument. [sarcasm]Yeah, /. readers have real influence. They have so much power over MS that MS can't become an ethical organization because of what /. readers have to say about its past..... [/sarcasm]
I can't believe anyone made that ridiculous argument. Just who would have made such an argument? Why, another MS shill of course. I doubt anyone else could have been that desperate.
Welcome to Slashdot (Score:1)
Please bury this comment I think it might be borderline heresy.
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Possibly because MS belongs more in the "religion" section ? You know, where people talk to inanimate objects in the hope that it will get something done for them ?
--
What a depressingly stupid machine.
And THAT'S why I don't disable sigs!
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Apple is taking up all the room.
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Some of it is actually reasonably good, these days - I was surprised how smooth Win7 runs even on a 256M VM. Other stuff keeps being utterly disgusting - I'm looking at you, sharepoint - and will keep being bashed on, although the main reason I so detest the company is the way they conduct business.
None of this is relevant to you, however,
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
If you're one of those that appreciate quality, you go with Microsoft.
Is this sarcasm?
I mean you even mention the red ring of death producing machine right there.
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If you're one of those that appreciate quality, you go with Microsoft.
Hmmm...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZSeries [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NonStop [wikipedia.org]
Yup, I see your point.
Amazing. (Score:2)
I think this is the first time I actually agree with the others that you are indeed a shill.
_
Re:Everything else than Microsoft (Score:1, Interesting)
TL;DR
Writing long crap and repeating it all over doesn't make it more right.
For your information, in my university, almost everyone uses a Mac - students and teachers. Most of them dual boot or virtualize fedora or ubuntu. I can count with my fingers the number of people running windows. Another interesting fact is that the worst students are the ones running *only* Microsoft Windows.
Oh, and by the way - I run another special flavor of Linux which probably doesn't mean anything to you.
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For your information, in my university, almost everyone uses a Mac - students and teachers. Most of them dual boot or virtualize fedora or ubuntu.
For your information, in my current workplace (and in every other previous workplace) everyone uses Windows and the words "dual boot" and "virtualize" would mean precisely nothing to them.
I assume you are some sort of computer science student? You are not a typical user, and a university is not the real world.
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And after 20 years, there still
isn't anything that comes even close to Visual Studio as a development environment.
*cough* *cough* And after 34 years, there still isn't anything that comes even close to Vi.
There! Fixed that for you.
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I disagree. Visual Studio with ViEmu blows them both away. Truly the best of both worlds.
What exactly is new here? (Score:3, Insightful)
For sufficiently large customers or groups of customers, it has always been possible to get special offers from Microsoft. I think the city of New York qualifies for this category.
For comparison:
In the early 90s, Microsoft created the XP Corporate edition that does not need activation, to appease large customers who were worried about losing the ability to install their copies of XP.
Later, Microsoft shared source code with some universities and government agencies to counter the advantage of Open Source in
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And by "special offer" you mean "not being forced to buy what you don't need"?
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In the case of NYC, obviously yes.
But Microsoft seems to be really flexible on those Very Important Customer deals. The examples I used are about
-no DRM (I think product activation is a form of DRM)
-giving access to the otherwise carefully guarded sources.
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In the early 90s, Microsoft created the XP Corporate edition that does not need activation, to appease large customers who were worried about losing the ability to install their copies of XP.
Uhhhhhhhh XP was released in 2001..... I think you need to recheck your dates.
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It would be great to see Open Source versions for such online tools, but there are none
Awful sure of yourself there, buddy. What tools have no OS counterparts?
I made the decision to upgrade all computers with Windows 7
Why would a business do that? There's little if any added functionality over XP. Yes, 7 is nicer, but there's no way it could increase productivity. What kind of businessman would waste cash like that? Especially in an economy like this? I suggest you start job hunting, because with that kind
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That is bad news for Google, which has been heavily investing in developing online versions of similar applications that Microsoft offers.
I think you got something mixed up - perhaps you meant to say "Microsoft, which has been heavily investing in catching up to the online product offering of Google"?
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Big cities are shit by nature.
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The same thing happened to me a few years ago. I'd been away from slashdot for a few years, changed ISPs and forgotten my /. password, so I re-registered with "sm62702" (later emailed /. help and got my old uid back). Someone registered under sm627O2 (replacing zero with capital O) and even went so far as to try and write journals like me (good luck with that).
Imitation is the creepiest form of flattery!