Linux.com

Software and or services become more valuable when more people use it and thus this is the essence of Metcalfe's law. That being the case logically the reverse would be true as well. Since the population of Microsoft office users greatly out number Microsoft employees and even greater than that of Microsoft management, why not choose not to use the product thus forcing Microsoft to comply to the consumer instead of the other way around. I know that this suggestion is extremely simplistic and the profound nature of it seems like a bad cliché; however, if we really made an effort they would acquiesce so not to loose market share. If the general public made contributions annually to organizations like Open Office or to the folks at AbiWord, say in the neighborhood of 10% of what Microsoft charges for Office Professional, they could mobilize far faster and more efficiently to produce a superior product. The truth of the matter is we have become lazy and complacent. We entrust our futures to “professionals” because we are so bogged down and burned out due to the extensive frivolous tasks and mind-numbing setbacks we encounter daily that by the time we get home our opinion resonates the mantra of “it ain’t my problem – this is my time, I’m off the clock”. This mentality however has paralyzed us into being cows lead by individuals that have only their best interest in mind trying to convince us all that it is for our own good. They give us speeches riddled with double talk jargon and charge us a fortune while all along expecting us to accept it because that is simply just the way it is. If Microsoft gets away with this, we are all at fault. If copyright law keeps going in the unethical direction it is going, we are all to blame. In America ownership constitutes 9/10th ‘s of the law. Bit by bit we are getting stripped not only of our ownership, but of our freedom to choose. I imagine eventually it will come down to the level that the book that I bought last month, and turned around and sold it to the used book store will eventually be illegal. The same patents and copyrights apply to books as to software. Yet because of the greed and the money behind that greed, competition is being squashed because it is no longer convenient and might require real effort to innovate instead of operating in the mediocrity that seems to be prevalent today.

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