Sunday, November 14, 2004

Breaking up with Microsoft

Thanks to clever marketing and domination over the business community (in North America anyway), Microsoft (MS) products have a large share of the software pie. I don't have anything against MS per se (besides price - oh! and security problems...). If you prefer their product because it is better than the competition, that's great. But do you know what the competition is? Well, let me fix that right now. On each line I will lead with the MS offering and follow with the alternative(s) (all prices in Canadian dollars):

MS Office ($200-650) - Open Office ($0) - Corel Wordperfect Office ($220) - Sun Star Office Suite ($85)

Internet Explorer (comes with Windows) - Firefox ($0) - Opera ($0 with ads - $48)

Outlook Express (comes with Windows) - Thunderbird ($0) - Eudora ($0 with ads - $60)

MSN Messenger (comes with Windows) - Gaim ($0) - Trillian ($0)

Media Player (comes with Windows) - Winamp ($0)

Windows ($150-450) - Linux (dozens of flavours ranging from $0 to $60 and up, such as Red Hat; Gentoo; Suse; Mandrake; Slackware; Knoppix....there's so many)


This list is by no means all inclusive...

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