You have a nicely formatted and informative blog; I’ve added it to my Blogroll.

First, thanks for sharing your school’s tentative responses to dealing with Microsoft’s new version of Office. I will, no doubt, be encountering the same problems when I begin my re-certification student teaching experience in August. Your school’s short-term workarounds are now on file.

But your post raises a bigger picture issue. Namely, is it in the best interests of the Internet-connected world to be dependent on proprietary software? A few years ago I read an article advocating everyone’s switching to HTML as their default format rather than DOC (MS Word). At the time, I remember thinking, “Come on; Word will always be with us and will always be compatible.” So much for my random musing. Upward software compatibility is as important as downward.

In my opinion, Microsoft has flexed its muscle at an ideal time. On the one hand, it is in Microsoft’s short-term interests; their move is certainly going to help their short-term bottom line. On the other hand, Microsoft’s move is also a wake-up call to those of us not invested in Microsoft’s success. Do we want this to happen again? I don’t think so. Microsoft’s move is an impetus to champion Web 2.0—or whatever else you’d like to call it. Google and a gang of others, as most of you know, have already published freely available web-based programs which accomplish the same tasks as those accomplished by Microsoft’s expensive Office. That means that Microsoft’s short-term gain for a few can be translated into vast long-term gains for the rest of us.

Tom.
http://tnturner.edublogs.org