E-Dribble

If you’re willing to forego the extended customer support for your sandwich.

If you own a computer, you’ve paid money, and usually a lot of money to Microsoft. They are likely the company that is providing the operating system you use, your office productivity software, mail clients, browsers and a majority of the rest of the software on your computer.

The majority of the people using this software don’t care. To be completely honest, I’m fine with that. I don’t want to strengthen a revolution or bring to light a percieved injustice. I do however want to talk to the person who thinks hundreds of dollars for an Office Suite is too much, and tell him that there is an alternative. In fact, there is an alternative to practically any application you can dream up. Here’s some examples just to get your noggin smoking:

MS Office ~~> Open Office.org(OOo): During our dealings with many clients, we have to share documents back and forth, and often during this process, they’ll ask us what we use, due to their inability to open some documents because they haven’t paid for Office. We point them to OpenOffice.org and to date, we have never had a complaint. With the ability to open MS Office format documents, there’s not much of a reason to fork out a paycheck’s worth of dough for the permission to use Office. We’ve used it for years, and we’ve never had an instance where we had to go find another application to open a certain document.

MS Internet Explorer ~~> Mozilla Firefox: There are many alternative browsers out there, and we’re not going to try to tell you which one is better, but we like Firefox. A lot. We use Internet Explorer for one thing; to test web page code for browser compatibility. Other than that, IE never sees the light of day on our desktop. For daily browsing, Firefox allows us to customize our experience on the web. Want to get rid of ads? You got it. Want to open particular tab sessions from a month and a half ago? No problem! Feel like knowing what the weather is at any moment in Kalamazoo? It’s at your fingertip. There are literally thousands of plugins or addons that allow you to make your browser work for you.

Outlook ~~> Thunderbird: Another offering from Mozilla that’s used in the office. It utilizes the same plugin(Addon) system which allows you to tailor your mail client to suit your taste. We’ve found it to be incredibly stable, and we’ve used it for a very long time.

MS Windows ~~> Linux: If you’re adventurous, you can get rid of Microsoft altogether. Consider not having to buy Vista when support can no longer be found for XP. Consider Linux. I’ve used it for years as my primary desktop, and I have no regrets. Although still considered the geek’s operating system, there are many distributions(called flavors) that cater to the new guy on the block that doesn’t want to be a geek. You can find out about the most prominent flavors at DistroWatch.

I wouldn’t suggest throwing your Windows computer out with the garbage before you try it though. It’s not for everyone. 99% of the people are perfectly happy with what they have, and if you are part of that percentage, we strongly urge you to stick with what you know. If however, you yearn for something different, pick a flavor and install it on a spare PC or as a secondary OS on your computer and play with it. Many of the distributions offer a “live cd”, which allows you to try it without installing anything. Just pop the cd in your computer and check it out!

There are thousands of examples of alternatives to be found. If you’ll spend a little bit of time looking, you can almost always find something. Consider taking a chance every once in a while. You might be pleasantly surprised.