Imagine if every car manufacturer used a different type of gasoline such that you had to go to a particular gas station in order to tank up. That's been the way computer software has been written in the past. Once you chose a word processor, for instance, you were stuck with using that word processor if you wanted to be able to open your documents. Further, if your friends or associates wanted to open your documents, they had to use the same word processor that you used. Of course there was a huge advantage to the biggest player in each application segment because he locked in his customers and forced others to switch to his application for the convenience of trading documents.

As I'm sure you know, the big guy was Microsoft. Their reluctance to use an open format for documents led to some of the success of Adobe's Acrobat software. With Acrobat, we can convert our documents into something that anyone using the free Acrobat Reader software can open. Now Microsoft is starting to see the benefit of sharing documents with other applications. Their adoption of the Open Document Format (ODF) in Office 2007 has been slow coming and it still has issues, but it brings us one step closer to being able to share ubiquitously.

This shift to support of ODF allows some of my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers to consider alternatives to Microsoft Office for some of their staff. Most of us don't use more than 10 - 15 percent of the power available to us in the Microsoft Office. We won't use more than 15 percent of the power in Open Office either. Their version 3.1 makes the applications nearly interchangeable with similar Microsoft offerings, at no cost.

It is incumbent on your IT support services consultant to bring you money saving ideas. Some ideas may be too risky (or not rewarding enough) for you to do, but you should be allowed to make the informed decision about things. We've mentioned the Open Office suite to several of our customers where we believe it makes sense. As of today, we've had no takers.