Oh wait, those don’t count because all those people were “tricked” into paying their hard-earned cash for Windows. They just haven’t seen the light.

Right.

And what’s your beef with Office 2008? It’s a Mac product, you can’t expect it to be as popular as its Windows counterpart.

Once an organization gets to the point where you don’t know every aspect of your fellow employees (I.E. “Does she like cheeseburger or vegemite sandwiches, regular or decaff?), then the amount of time it takes to customize each solution takes away from production efficiency.

There is no such thing as too big, or more precisely; too prosperous. What this means though, is that you can be too busy to ‘re-invent the wheel’ (write your own software) each & every time a new employee joins the force.

If you’re employees were that good, they’d all be in competition with your company.

Employers also should not have to find DLL or other specialized file updates to read regular reports. Will Open OS eventually resolve these issues? YES!

What I’m suggesting then is perhaps a way to optimize the tools we have, as we gradually adopt newer/smaller/faster/better replacements for those applications.

Either that, or a way for vendors to add value (customize 2.0 OOS tools), at lower cost to the end users than currently offered by big box vendors like Microsoft.

Web based solutions will eventually provide what business needs to produce value, but getting reliable robust solutions out there is a step that has yet to be made.

You are correct about the current state of VISTA, but that was also true of early versions of OSX & WinXP. By bloat, I’m sure you are referring to the hardware driver compatability, and user-proofing that have gone into tweaking the operation systems & application suites over the years.

Vista should have all the bugs out, not long after XP is retired, because business will demand it, just as so many other OS’s have adjusted over the years.

What business require to function at profit is low-cost, but ROBUST (user & wear resistant) software.

If you know of a lite-ware vendor, who can provide guaranteed service software which is protected against inept users, malware, and natural disaster… then you have the recipe for a company which will make billions.

[Seeing that light-bulb yet?]

Be sure that includes nativization in Mandarin as well as English.

I would love it if Openware were as ubiquitous as you suggest, because then there would be a huge need for technical support again.

We’re already seeing a trend toward this with the hiring demand (vaccum really) for Unix System Administrators.

I’m already brushing off very old skills, to get back into that command-line world of doing things the hard way… just so business managers can use cheaper server hardware with the Linux/Unix software. It is much more labor-intensive for me. Everyone knows that time is money, and techs are going to start charging a LOT by the hour.

Or… you could just stick with ‘bloatware’, which is self-mending & robust. The balance decisions becomes one of time spent in customization & developement, versus ease & low cost of administration.