2005 8
Life Without Microsoft 2.0
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
Ok. I tried to live without Microsoft for two weeks now and I confess…I’ve failed miserably. Like everything in life, there was some good and some bad in not using Microsoft anymore. But personally, as much as Firefox worked really well and is much better than Internet Explorer, Thunderbird is no match for Outlook. The rest of Microsoft Office is marginally superior to Openoffice, with the not-so-negligible fact that Openoffice is free and Microsoft Office is really expensive. For one person, the hefty price of a licence is tolerable, but buying licences for a whole company or NGO? No, thanks.
Bottom line: You definitely gain some things living without Microsoft, but you certainly lose out on other things.
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No Comments
Karin on November 11, 2005 ·
I disagree. I have used Microsoft office from 1998, office97 and Office 2000, later Office 2003, skipped it 2 years ago right after I had installed the most recent version (Office2003) – but, can’t uinstall the MS crap!
I much prefer Open Office.
EssentialPIM and Sunbird are both good replacements for Outlook’s calendar function. Many email clients are far better than outlook, like Thunderbird, to name one. It’s wise to split the calendar/note function from email (out of security precautions).
Opera and Firefox are both more functional than Internet Explorer. Far more important, they’re aafer.
My next computer won’t be running Windows at all. Either I will be back on MacIntosh again – I used Macs ONLY from 1992 ’till ’98, and OS 9 and Win98, ME (crap!)XPH and XPpro in recent years, – or I will be exploring a Linux distro.
Ted Taylor on January 31, 2006 ·
Thunderbird is useless for me. I run multiple email addresses through the same domain, but Thunderbird does not allow this. I don’t know of any other client that does this, but it makes Thunderbird a comlete no-no for me.
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Antoin O Lachtnain on November 8, 2005 ·
I agree with you. Mind you, I’m more comfortable with thunderbird than Outlook though. Aside from the price, which you can’t argue with, I feel it’s more stable. From a technical point of view, thunderbird stores its files in a fairly standard format, which means that it’s generally easier to recover things if they go wrong. And in my experience with Outlook, when things go wrong, they can go really really wrong.
I use Sunbird, the Mozilla diary system. I have to say, it isn’t as good as Outlook, but it is quite usable.
So is fon going to be an OpenOffice shop!?
Antoin.