I think there's a window for developers to move en-masse to a new OS. It's a shame that at just the same time as developers are finally waking up to the fact that OSX and Windows are both moving in a worrying direction, there's no clear champion with mainstream (dev) appeal in the linux/bsd firmament either.
As long as Word/Excel are seen as required by business and consumers, Windows will always be with us, and that's where the serious money will be for developers and Providers of Enterprise Excess.
It's frustrating to me, because most of the Word documents I see do not need or use the vast caverns of Word utility. I'm guessing 90% (probably 99%) or more of docs I see and produce could be satisfied with text, or rtf at most. We spend hundreds of dollars individually on Office and get locked into Windows because we might someday need to do a mail merge.
Similar for Excel. Excel is an excellent product that most people don't need. Most of what we produce with Excel could be done with csv and a basic presentation layer. For the serious stuff, we would have been better off with SQL databases and presentation products decoupled from the database.
Comments
I think there's a window for developers to move en-masse to a new OS. It's a shame that at just the same time as developers are finally waking up to the fact that OSX and Windows are both moving in a worrying direction, there's no clear champion with mainstream (dev) appeal in the linux/bsd firmament either.
As long as Word/Excel are seen as required by business and consumers, Windows will always be with us, and that's where the serious money will be for developers and Providers of Enterprise Excess.
It's frustrating to me, because most of the Word documents I see do not need or use the vast caverns of Word utility. I'm guessing 90% (probably 99%) or more of docs I see and produce could be satisfied with text, or rtf at most. We spend hundreds of dollars individually on Office and get locked into Windows because we might someday need to do a mail merge.
Similar for Excel. Excel is an excellent product that most people don't need. Most of what we produce with Excel could be done with csv and a basic presentation layer. For the serious stuff, we would have been better off with SQL databases and presentation products decoupled from the database.