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Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

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Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#1

Post by AlexMuir »

Today I installed ubuntu and have been blown away by it. It actually is easy to use and works very well.

I'm looking at microsoft's product line and there are mature free alternatives to most stuff:

Windows - Linux

Office - open office, google docs

Exchange - gmail

I'd be worried if I was Microsoft. And I know their profit is driven by enterprise, but today's startups are tomorrow's enterprise customers.

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#2

Post by carbocation »

For me, Office is the killer. You cannot seamlessly transfer things such as PPTX files from Office 2007 to OpenOffice. This is a critical problem, and is the thing keeping me on Windows. All of the scientists at my institution in my field use Microsoft software for presentations and for some amount of data exchange (the 'high-level', post-processing stuff--the actual data lives in flatfiles or databases). This, unfortunately, keeps me a bit locked in.

I suppose I could just run Wine...

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#4

Post by _delirium »

carbocation wrote: post #2

For me, Office is the killer. You cannot seamlessly transfer things such as PPTX files from Office 2007 to OpenOffice. This is a critical problem, and is the thing keeping me on Windows. All of the scientists at my institution in my field use Microsoft software for presentations and for some amount of data exchange (the 'high-level', post-processing stuff--the actual data lives in flatfiles or databases). This, unfor…

That used to be the case for me, but around here the Office ecosystem has been increasingly fragmenting between versions--- some departments are all on Windows 7 with Office 2007, but quite a lot of machines are still on XP with Office 2003, and some folks (esp. on laptops) are using the Mac version of Office. The interoperability mess that causes is pushing people away from sending out Office file formats at all (mostly moving towards PDF), and to the extent they do, they choose save-as for some old version of Office rather than sending docx/pptx.

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#5

Post by AlexMuir »

carbocation wrote: post #2

For me, Office is the killer. You cannot seamlessly transfer things such as PPTX files from Office 2007 to OpenOffice. This is a critical problem, and is the thing keeping me on Windows. All of the scientists at my institution in my field use Microsoft software for presentations and for some amount of data exchange (the 'high-level', post-processing stuff--the actual data lives in flatfiles or databases). This, unfor…

PowerPoint and publisher are the two office apps that seem to be hardest to replace. But they're both ripe for web-based alternatives.

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#7

Post by melvinram »

"Free" isn't the thing Microsoft should be worried about. If Twitter grows to become 50,000 people in 10 years, they won't select Google Docs because it's free. They'll choose it because it helps them get work done better for an overall lower cost, and that is really what Microsoft should be worried about because their competitive edge in most areas is eroding quickly.

For example, Android isn't going to beat Windows Mobile because it's free. It's going to beat Windows Mobile because it's really a better OS (i.e. it's relatively open, has more apps, improving rapidly, etc.)

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#8

Post by Khao »

Personally, I don't think that any OS is even close to being what Windows is. Maybe Macs are the closest and I believe they got a few things down better than Windows, but this alternative isn't free either. As for Linux I have tried different linux OSes and I see only use for them in server environments. None of them have made me want to lose Windows completely because they weren't as plug and play as Windows is.

Another killer point for Microsoft is the whole Visual Studio environment and the .NET language. I haven't found a single IDE that is as powerful as Visual Studio and the language (C# notably, but also any other .net language) is also by far my favorite language. Compared to Java, I know that the language isn't that much different, but because Visual Studio makes it so easy, so plug and play, it gives you the freedom to concentrate only on the code and nothing else. I've had bad experiences where IDEs made from Java for writing Java software are really slow and buggy, and that's not what I've seen so far from software written in .Net either as free or paid softwares.

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