Alastair Crooke, the Director and Founder of the Conflicts Forum, has said that in his experience of negotiating with terrorists it is pointless to ignore groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, hoping they will go away. There is no nice, fluffy, occidentally inclined organisation waiting to take their place. It will be al-Qaeda who replace them and things will change for the worse. Much the same seems to be said about the adoption of Vista and Microsoft’s Open XML format.
Over the years there have always been headlines about such and such company abandoning Microsoft Windows, or Macs or Office. This time there seems to be more about firms deciding they are not abandoning Windows XP to move to Vista and there’s even an active movement to stop Open XML becoming recognised as an ISO standard.
Torpidity
In both cases the move – or more correctly, lack of move – is because of the control it would give Microsoft, who given their way would have us all wearing their digital burkhas. Some, such as America’s Auto Warehousing Company, have gone one step further and switched their entire organisation away from Microsoft products apart from where there are currently no alternatives. In those cases, the software is being rewritten and in the meantime run in a virtual environment. They found that the new Intel Macs run Windows blazingly fast, faster than any PC he’s seen according to AWC’s CIO Dale Frantz.
The AWC are a huge, full-service car spares, logistics and delivery company whose customers are the biggest names in the business. They cover the entire of the US and Canada. For an organisation of this pedigree to move to Macs must surely open Steve Jobs’ eyes to the potential Apple are missing while they concentrate on the consumer market.
Short-sighted
Their decision to use Mac OS X was taken after examining the alternatives, a decision that would scare other companies who erroneously see Macs as under-powered, over-priced and too geared to specific areas such as publishing and certain scientific communities. Apple have never shown great interest in attracting corporate business and gave AWC no help in the transition. This seems rather short-sighted considering the help Apple gives in other projects such as Virginia Tech’s Mac-powered super computer whose success led onto the US Army and others constructing Mac super computers.
Microsoft has brought this fatwa on themselves. Windows XP has been highly successful and runs on over 500 million computers. As long as those computers continue to function users have no real need to upgrade, especially as it will involve hardware and software costs. The company has also announced it will continue to supply bug fixes to XP until 2014 and possibly even beyond that. Many of the new security features built into Vista are available as free or low cost tools. The rest of the new operating system is just goodies rather than essentials as far as business is concerned.
Where this will end remains to be seen. As a long-term Mac user, Windows XP is the first Microsoft operating system I would consider moving to. As a book designer I can foresee a time when I will not be able to open Word documents because they are in Open XML format – in fact this has started to happen - and Microsoft provide no working translators. So much for them making it a “standard”.