A large step in the evolution of personal computing has taken place, largely unnoticed, in the past month or so.
The world has about 600 million personal computers. About 130 million of them are made each year and perhaps as many as 70 million are discarded – some, no doubt, thrown out of office windows in blind fury.
In this huge market, Microsoft has almost a monopoly. More than 90 per cent of the PCs run the Microsoft Windows operating system and about 80 per cent of them run Microsoft Office which bundles word-processing, spreadsheet, presentation, database, email and organising software.
Windows costs about $80. The recommended retail price for Office is $850. Not many pay that, but many do. Others pirate (though at $850 you have to wonder who the pirates are), or buy student or multiple licences at a discount.
Even so, it amounts to tens of billions of dollars going to Microsoft and making its founder, Bill Gates, the richest man on earth. The profit margins are huge because it costs so little to produce a copy of the software – less than $1 for the CD and a couple of dollars for the packaging
Now a serious challenge to the accumulation of those mountains of money has begun. OpenOffice Version 2 went out on the internet. It does virtually everything Microsoft Office does and more.
This is not just a geek story about a fight between two computer companies. It is also a story about capitalism, competition, intellectual property and the public interest. The difference here is that OpenOffice is free. And in time it will soon start to irritate Microsoft.
Incidentally, I am writing this on OpenOffice. It is the first time I have not used Microsoft to write anything since I gave away the typewriter more than 20 years ago.
Version 1 of OpenOffice was not fully competitive. But with Version 2 there would be no functional or ease-of-use difference between the free OpenOffice and the grossly over-priced Microsoft Office for the vast bulk of users.
If you add a couple of other free applications for digital photos (Picasa) and for email and the internet (Firefox and Thunderbird), for the first time is is now possible for the ordinary home user and office worker who is not a computer freak to get all the software for all the ordinary uses for nothing.
A stroll into any office or home these days would reveal one computer person with a few hundred dollars worth of Microsoft products on it. This must change as cost-conscious corporations, associations, charities and governments slowly get the message that hundreds of thousands of dollars are needlessly being handed over to a large US corporation.
There are some amusing twists here.
The very tactics that Microsoft used to get where it is have made the OpenOffice challenge what it is.
Microsoft was good at taking other corporations’ ideas and marketing them more successfully. There is no copyright in ideas – just in the expression of them. The copyright protection that Microsoft sought was in the source code – the strings of 1s and 0s.
It was always the wrong form of protection. Legislatures should have created a special patent protection for computer programs, but they were too slow off the mark. The whole theory of the state giving for a period a protected monopoly for intellectual property is that ultimately the intellectual property would be made public. A 50 or 70 year copyright protection for a piece of writing is fine, because there is a public benefit at the end. The now-unprotected works of Shakespeare and Dickens are in the public domain. But what use will a string of 1s and 0s be in 50 years’ time?
There should have been a public-interest trade-off when the state gave protected monopolies to the inventors of computer programs. After a time – say seven or 10 years the programs should have gone into the public domain when they would have been some use.
So legislatures and world governments having failed the public interest, the computing-using community has done the job for them.
After Microsoft got huge market share it then went about making it difficult for any new-comer or the remnant of existing players.
When Netscape’s internet browser got too successful, Microsoft simply gave away its Internet Explorer to ensure no-one else got a significant share of the PC market. Now it is getting some of its own medicine.
In another example, newer versions of Word will not display the text (let alone the formatting) of documents created in any other word-processing program. So the pressure is for everyone to comply by using Word paying for periodic upgrades.
But now personal computers for office use have evolved to a maturity where there is not much more that software upgrades can usefully add. Indeed, they often take more time learning than they are worth. And Microsoft’s new versions often take control and do things they think are best for you which you do not really want.
Incidentally, OpenOffice reads documents created in other software and can be saved so they can be read in Microsoft Office. This is because it has a open-source philosophy.
So here we are about 10 years after the first reasonably workable bundle of office software and it is at last in the public domain. It is now up to individuals, associations, charities and governments to take it up.