bobpeers -> blog

My girlfriends computer has Windows Vista installed in Danish but has the UK version of Office 2003 Professional so I was rather surprised this week that I couldn’t change the spell check language in Word 2003 to Danish.

I had (rather naively as it turns out) just assumed that something costing as much as Office 2003 would also include a pile of dictionaries for spell checking, how wrong could I be.

To achieve what I wanted I’d actually have to buy Microsoft Office Proofing Tools 2003, which seems hard right now as all the sites I looked at showed it as discontinued!

To put this in context I use OpenOffice on Linux (cost zero) and installing a new dictionary takes me about 1 minutes using yum (cost also zero).

On a similar theme I was recently helping a friend with her computer when she asked me if she should buy Microsoft Word for her pc just so she can read Word attachments that are sent to her. She had very basic requirements and was not at all computer literate.

It struck me that for most people if they are sent a Word document they will of course assume they need Word to view the file, Microsoft Office document formats are so ubiquitous that many people just connect any text file with Word.

The idea that people fork out for Microsoft Word just for this purpose horrifies me when there are many free alternatives available. But of course knowledge is power in my case, many people are not so lucky.

With all the rumours about when the next version of Windows, called Windows 7, might be released (sometime from 2009 to 2011 it seems) along with the announcement that Windows XP will still be available to manufacturers of selected systems (most notably small, cheap Laptops like the Asus Eee PC)until June 30th, 2010 it seems that Microsoft is feeling the pressure these days.

On one hand they’re having a hard time convincing businesses to make the switch to Vista while on the other hand there is a growing demand for cheap, portable laptops which just don’t have the power to run Vista. Many of these run Linux as a result, as it’s far better suited to low spec machines. Of course Microsoft had to react to stop this Linux creep into their market share.

On the corporate side in the company I work for there’s just no way we could move to Vista, most of our computers have 512MB of ram with 3GHz Pentium 4 processors that just won’t be up to the job. It would cost us a small fortune to upgrade these computers with no obvious return on investment for doing so.

One of the main complains with Vista seems to be that’s it’s just too resource hungry and slow. Run Vista and XP side by side and XP leaves Vista standing. It may well be more secure but trying to sell this to a consumer when they want something newer and faster is a tough sell.

One of Microsofts main problems is that Windows has just become too complex plus they’re always trying to be backwards compatible.

It seems that on one hand Microsoft hails Vista as a great success while on the other hand they intentionally start rumours about the next version. Exactly why a company would now shift to Vista with the rumours of a new version that’s smaller, faster and will make Vista obsolete is beyond me.

Even for a consumer like myself it makes me think twice about buying a new laptop with Vista installed. I have my issues with Vista and knowing that it may be replaced sooner rather than later certainly makes me think about waiting.