the microsoft upgrade treadmill

the microsoft upgrade treadmill

Posted Mar 30, 2007 21:21 UTC (Fri) by undefined (guest, #40876)
In reply to: OpenOffice.org 2.2 released by mikov
Parent article: OpenOffice.org 2.2 released

don't ever plan to upgrade? that's what i thought.

i have a laptop that runs windows 2000. (every other computer in the house runs linux, even with open source video drivers, and when i personally used the laptop it ran debian, but since giving it to the wife she doesn't have time to wrestle with linux's laptop hardware support. she needs windows anyways for a financial application.)

windows 2000 will be functionally adequate for that laptop until the hardware dies. it allows her to use firefox, thunderbird, openoffice, and psi (see, i have a migration plan in place ;-). it perfectly supports the laptop's hardware and i haven't met a hardware vendor yet that doesn't support windows 2000 (as everybody supports xp and the driver models are very similar).

but i'm about to begrudgingly convert the laptop to xp (or retire it from active service as its underwhelming performance is starting to become very noticable). why? end-of-life software support. regular updates have already ended (and i didn't appreciate the time it took recently to understand and manually update the timezone database for DST) and security updates are going to stop shortly.

the story for applications isn't much different. no need for hardware support, but you instead have interoperability concerns (plug-ins, data exchange formats, etc). and security updates are still, unfortunately, needed at the application level.

so, you'll eventually have to migrate away from office 2007, it's just a matter of when and to what.

rant: if you are going to choose proprietary software, choose a proprietary operating system, but not applications. people don't use a desktop computer because of the os, but because of the applications. actually, i don't even use my computer because of the specific applications, but because of their functionality. i can email with sylpheed, thunderbird, evolution, or squirrelmail. i can browse with iceweasel, iceape, firefox, seamonkey, or ie. i can write and run python, c++, or java on multiple platforms. my wife has even said she could go back to using pen & paper for the budget if necessary, and it would probably be less frustrating (all budget software sucks). nearly all of those applications are cross-platform (linux, windows, solaris, freebsd), so my options for an os are nearly limitless. but when somebody tells me they are tied to a proprietary application on a proprietary os, they might as well tell me all their money is in the stock market and they hope it defies history and never crashes again (see "diversification").

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