Sorry, but a lot of these points look like Microsoft-playbook FUD. I'm guessing that you're trying to get more hits via SEO on a hacker-friendly website.
However, most of the people here are Linux by default on their servers, and whatever comes natively on their laptop - which for most web developers seems to be OSX these days.
To address your points (quickly) :
Incompatibilities : DOCX isn't even compatable between Microsoft products, and we recently noticed that gmail converts it silently to DOC : Making it a broken format if the documents are ever sent over the web to a client.
Interaction : Not as much of a problem as Microsoft would like. Clients seem quite ready to accept formatting snafus as Microsoft's problem. For WYSIWYG, use PDF. For editing, formatting is flexible. Conversion team HA!
Installation : LibreOffice on Linux is a much more scriptable solution that Windows/Office. Purely because of licensing issues. Difficult to take a lecture on security...
Email : Selecting a decent email client is pretty easy. Particularly since Microsoft Outlook's implementation of IMAP is so broken. If you're interested in restriction employees from forwarding emails, I guess that's something that could be handled by some sort of corporate email relay - which will probably run quite nicely on a UNIX system.
Visio, Project, or OneNote : Actually, not everything has to be bought from Microsoft, does it? This is kind of scraping the barrel, unless your solution requires all software to be bought from Microsoft.
I'm pretty certain you'll have plausible-sounding rebuttals to all these points. But (short of downvoting me off the page) my off-the-cuff response will be linked to your copy-paste effort for everyone to see.
Sorry, but a lot of these points look like Microsoft-playbook FUD. I'm guessing that you're trying to get more hits via SEO on a hacker-friendly website.
Your post was great aside from this indulgence of paranoia. (Well, that and the denial of OneNote, because even though I'm a 100% Mac user at this point I still miss OneNote; there really is no alternative and I'm still sad about it.)
And I did downvote you because of it, though IIRC it gets wiped because I chose to respond to you instead. Accusations of FUD and the "Microsoft playbook" aren't right.
If I was wrong in suggesting Astroturfing, then I apologize. And thanks for un-downvoting me.
Looking at what developers are choosing (when given a free choice) also makes me think that Microsoft is losing ground. They used to be able to claim "It's better" - a much more enticing sales pitch than "You can never leave".
On the enterprise front, going forward, it's going to be easier to get management interested in web/intranet delivered solutions via the PC (or iPad) browser. Far fewer worries about roll-out, hardware upgrades, etc.
One of the big arguments that Microsoft (and its partners) has always been switching/training costs. And with the Office 2010 button bar, coupled with Windows 8 'tiles', I think they've created a massive own-goal. It's pretty easy to roll a rock-solid Fedora/XFCE/LibreOffice/Thunderbird/Firefox image, which will feel very familiar indeed to users.
I wanna know why people use MS Office, anyway: 99% of the communications are: Please click this link to open this Word doc on a web server.... couldn't we just post up a HTML page instead? I bang my head at work every time someone does the above. It's a big waste of time, and money. And don't get me started on SharePig
I agree with you, for the most part (though I actually do like the Ribbon when I need to use Office). I just find slinging around claims of astroturfing to be counterproductive, especially when your points are solid. :)
If a comment or an item is worth a downvote, it's not a valuable contribution, nor does it contribute to the conversation. Replying to it then becomes pointless, and you are replying to nothing of value and something that should not contribute to the conversation. This would, as a result, make your comment equally worthless and equally devoid of value.
By commenting, you are suggesting that the comment does contribute to the conversations as its assumed that you would try to make your comment worthwhile.
You can't have it both ways. Either the comment is worthless and should not be read or replied to, or comment contributes to the conversation by at least sparking interesting and worthwhile followup commentary.
However, most of the people here are Linux by default on their servers, and whatever comes natively on their laptop - which for most web developers seems to be OSX these days.
To address your points (quickly) :
Incompatibilities : DOCX isn't even compatable between Microsoft products, and we recently noticed that gmail converts it silently to DOC : Making it a broken format if the documents are ever sent over the web to a client.
Interaction : Not as much of a problem as Microsoft would like. Clients seem quite ready to accept formatting snafus as Microsoft's problem. For WYSIWYG, use PDF. For editing, formatting is flexible. Conversion team HA!
Installation : LibreOffice on Linux is a much more scriptable solution that Windows/Office. Purely because of licensing issues. Difficult to take a lecture on security...
Email : Selecting a decent email client is pretty easy. Particularly since Microsoft Outlook's implementation of IMAP is so broken. If you're interested in restriction employees from forwarding emails, I guess that's something that could be handled by some sort of corporate email relay - which will probably run quite nicely on a UNIX system.
Visio, Project, or OneNote : Actually, not everything has to be bought from Microsoft, does it? This is kind of scraping the barrel, unless your solution requires all software to be bought from Microsoft.
I'm pretty certain you'll have plausible-sounding rebuttals to all these points. But (short of downvoting me off the page) my off-the-cuff response will be linked to your copy-paste effort for everyone to see.