It’s also helpful to be able to show up to any new potential job and be able to accomplish what you need to do without asking that organization to spend a dime on software for you. When you have a solid portfolio of Joomla! websites, GIMP edited imagery, and Google Apps tricks, it’s hard to find a service organization that doesn’t give your application a much more serious look. Sure, in this day and age, make sure you know how to work with the corporate giants’ software (but let’s be honest–who under the age of 35 doesn’t?), but why waste even comparatively small amounts of money?

What would the world look like if we stopped measuring cost in terms of dollars and cents and started thinking about the cost in terms of pictures of the people who get to live another day because we weren’t wasteful? I may be a dreamer, but at least I still have a dream.

What I think will happen is that we will continue to see more fragmentation of the market. Google Docs and Zoho are good, simpler interfaces and will attract more people as they feel more comfortable with not having the applications on their own computers. For my use, Office will continue to be preferred until Google and others can create a usable relational database and a good page layout program. Granted MS Publisher badly needs an upgrade and an interface tweak, but there’s nothing I’ve seen online which can match it or other layout programs.

Likewise, open source suites will also take a greater chunk of the user base as people become more comfortable with them.

Office will continue to be used in larger offices, as long as IT departments want to support one type of office suite and feel more comfortable with the security of their own networks than with cloud computing. In my opinion, Microsoft’s Achilles’ heel is in the area of graphics suites (like Adobe’s — also a high end and high price commodity) and in collaboration.

Where everybody wins is in choice. One prediction I think you can safely make is that the market will continue to splinter. Microsoft won’t go out of business anytime soon. If their market share drops too much, all they have to do is lower prices a modest amount. For those who can make do with open source or online software, they will also have better choices. The key determinants will be features, security, collaborative-ness, and ease of use, not who is paying for the coding for the software.

The other flaw in the article’s arguments is assuming that the number of computer users is static, a zero-sum game. As more people use the web and use computers at both home and work (and the library and the café, not to mention smartphones), all the different software platforms could grow their user bases.

I could see word and maybe powerpoint going away. But not Excel or Outlook.

And well I tried Google Docs, but I think it’s a kludge. OpenOffice ist far better. If you don’t need the sharing features of Google Docs there is no reason to use it.

An excellent example is myself. I haven’t actually purchased software in a long time, simply because I get along just fine on GNU/Linux and all the free, open-source applications that can be installed on it.

I thought you were making a decent case until I got to 4: less features than Notepad? That’s a little too much sarcasm to take you seriously. Since when does Notepad have concurrent editing? revision history with diffing? bookmarks, comments, tables, TOC, headers and footers, styles?

Now I’m not sure I should believe anything else in your post. For example I’ve been hearing about this office on the web thing for two years so, where is it? Smells like vaporware.

I feel that this is such a generational thing: In a recent job I had to use Outlook and I hated that piece of junk, but all the old-timers loved it.