Print is Dead

For the early part of my childhood, I never had access to a computer. They were still sci-fi devices all big and filled rooms and were DATABASES. They could shoot nukes across the world and were powered by a computer in American called WHOPPER which is why for ages I thought that’s what Burger King’s tagline ‘Home of the Whopper’ meant. So for all intents and purposes, for a small boy growing up in Bournemouth it might have been a parallel universe. So instead I read books. All books. All the time. Loads of them. And I absolutely loved it. I had my head constantly in a book pretty much from the age of 7 to 13. Then I got my own computer. It was pretty cool. I could make it speak in a weird Stephen Hawking voice and I could play games on it. It was a useful diversion. I remember doing some homework, making a mistake, applying some tip-ex, then booting up my computer to play a quick game whilst it dried. Several hours later my parents demanded to see my homework and I...er... oops.

I bought a modem for it by saving up my pocket money. Wow. The internet wasn’t quite as we know it but it was on the way. I was on bulletin boards and then AOL and it was keyword: amazing. But the speeds were slow, and I couldn’t really do much. I still read loads of books. Fast forward a few years where I hardly ever read a book for fun in university. Too much going on. Then I travelled abroad for a few years. I read a lot then as it was handy to have something to read on planes, trains, and er buses. I also got into audiobooks too, as I was sometimes too far away from English language books stores to buy books so I downloaded them and listened to them instead.

Nowadays, I am a book hoarder and collector, but seldom reader of them. I just don’t have time. Yes, I sneak in a few pages here and there during the day when I read the books I have on my phone, but I don’t consciously sit down and read. Yet ironically, I probably physically read more than I have ever done in my life. A few newspaper websites, magazines, numerous blogs, techy stuff, work PDFs on my kindle. I’m all read out. When I travel for business, I do read to pass the time, but that’s about it. I save up books now to read on holidays. I haven’t been on holiday since I became a dad so I guess I will have to see how that pans out.  

The Death Knell of Microsoft Office

A lot of people use Microsoft Office products both in business and home environments. If you use it at home, then you are more inclined to want to use it at work, and vice versa. Microsoft make an absolute killing on corporate licences – they even have their own auditing business that makes sure people have the right number of licences. Microsoft have built an ecosystem on compatibility, changing things up a little here and there just ensure that the free alternatives (OpenOffice, Libre Office, Google Docs) aren’t quite there yet. For IT departments and buyers, to bastardise a phrase originally made for IBM, “nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft stuff”. It is a compelling argument

To ensure that people have access to this cash cow, they make student licences super cheap (this is the modus operandi of a lot of software companies) or even basically turning a blind eye to pirate copies (as in China) as they know that if people get used to the software they will stick with it iteration after iteration and want to work with it.

And Microsoft Office is a good product. It works. MS Access and PowerPoint cannot be bettered by the free alternatives so power users need it. But for the rest of us, we probably don’t. People had a hissy fit (myself included) regarding the revamping of Office 2007 but we dealt with it and can now use it as before. Which seems a bit odd, as actually doing business stuff hasn’t really changed since the 90s and basically Office hasn’t either. It’s just got bulkier and more irascible like an elderly Jabba the Hut.

So Office has been bumbling along, possibly in decline but still made folders of money from hapless businesses. But Microsoft just made a very big mistake. A huge one. For single users of Office 2013, they will no longer let you install a copy of Office more than once. The version you buy or download will forever be tied to one machine. If you muck up your computer, then you will need to purchase a new version costing from between £50 - £350. No longer will you be able to buy a version and keep it as a backup to install on your new machine when you replace it or fix your own machine. That’s me done. I have used the free alternatives and straddled the fence up to now, but I am going free for good.