Weaning companies off Microsoft Office
JP nails it, saying “Lock-ins need lock-pickers“:
Somewhere inside my head, there is no difference between my buying a song via the iTunes store and my creating a spreadsheet via Microsoft Excel.
With iTunes, everyone’s up in arms. Everyone understands that DRM of that sort is not a good thing. And people find ways of unlocking the music.
How come people don’t feel the same way about Office documents? Isn’t that a form of DRM? How come nobody objects? How come we don’t have clever people finding ways of freeing up such documents from their lock-ins? After all, there is a tangible measurable market for such migration tools. A huge market.
I’ve been very happily using Open Office for the last year, and haven’t looked back.
Filed under: Business, Life, Technology, Treating Customers Well
OpenOffice is OK, but, speaking as someone who uses Excel and VBA as part of my job, Excel stomps all over the competition (with the exception of Lotus 1-2-3, which, sadly, doesn’t really qualify as competition any more.)
Anyway, here’s the difference between music DRM and speadsheet DRM.
I might use any old spreadsheet program to create a basic speadsheet, but, for something decent that does cool stuff, I’d use a particular package. So a well-made Excel file isn’t just a spreadsheet; it’s an Excel file, designed on Excel to use Excel’s functions to do stuff in Excel. That’s what it is.
No musician ever made music using iTunes. iTunes is not a part of what the music actually is, just as CDs weren’t and vinyl wasn’t. They’re just media. Excel is not merely a medium for grids of numbers; it is a tool. Customers recognise this. What would you rather buy: an iTunes MP3 of a song you hate or an old cassette of a song you love?
A more accurate parallel would be not between Excel and iTunes but between Excel and a guitar.