I think it's more a matter of engineering resources. When you're a web-centric company, you'll do anything in your power to bring about the death of IE6.
Have you tried 7? That early alpha that leaked from PDC worked better than Vista ever has for me, never mind a proper beta.
Windows 7 isn't Vista, it's what Vista should always have been. Yes, it largely copies Vista's UI, but it also makes a lot of nice but subtle enhancements on the original, including performance and not such an insanely overbearing UAC security model. In my limited testing, 7's UAC is much closer to how it shows up in OS X and Linux, at least in terms of frequency (whether the security model it represents is actually solid remains to be seen).
Assuming that major hardware manufacturers don't fuck it up with bad drivers again, anyways. In my experience, that's largely what killed Vista. We're going on two years now I think, and I still can't get a proper not-broken Vista driver from nVidia, on a then-new GPU.
As a Mac user... I certainly won't say that 7 is perfect (nor is OS X), but it certainly shows that Microsoft has been taking a lot of the bad feedback for Vista to heart. And quite frankly, I'd like to see heavy 7 adoption among Windows users if for no other reason than it comes bundled with the standards-compliant IE8.
Some Mac software developer claimed to do this a while ago on his small commercial product (a completely harmless dialog box saying something to the effect of "pirated key detected, erasing your hard drive"). He had to open-source the product - thereby completely killing its revenue stream - just to save face, and suffice to say a lot of people that remember the incident better than I avoid any software from this developer.
I assure you, NOT all publicity is good publicity, despite sayings to the contrary.
So go for it, but don't be surprised if it ends up completely killing the product. It sounds like you've got some sort of enterprisey product, and I guarantee that no sane company would even risk continuing to use your product (never mind getting any future business) if there was even the slightest risk of that happening.
It's a trojan - you have no idea what else it's doing. If all it does is screw with your HOSTS file and play a stupid audio track I agree, but it could be doing all sorts of other unknown fun stuff to your machine with the root access it has.
You think this is so you don't have to buy a new graphics card? The only reason companies would go for this is because it changes their games from a product to a service, so piracy goes away. Next-gen DRM, if you will (next-gen doesn't have to be worse, however; I avoid buying games due to how invasive the DRM is and know plenty of people who do the same, so the next generation of the stuff damn well better address that).
If it's implemented correctly it would still offer us advantages - play from any computer with a net connection (meaning proper gaming on Linux and Mac, as you'd need just a client to interface with their app, not the low-level DirectX APIs) would be enough for me. I see publishers taking a Zune-esque approach where you could get unlimited access to any of their games for some standard monthly fee (which makes a lot more sense with games than music anyways). Making stuff cheap, easy, and accessible goes a long way when the only downside to your competition is that it's illegal, especially when people don't seem to care if the numbers you can spot at ThePirateBay are anything to go by.
As for the implementation issues, I'll second the VNC analogy. Of course, it seems to be less responsive than either Microsoft or Apple's implementation of system-specific remote desktop software, but that comes down to encoding tricks (like only re-sending parts of the screen that actually changed, or a more procedural-type "draw a standard app window with this text at point X,Y" sharing rather than sending jpegs across the wires). It hardly matters for gaming though - I *have* tried gaming over VNC, ARD, and RDC, and even over wired gig-e you can't get a smooth picture, let alone something responsive. I think that's more of a CPU bandwidth issue than a network one, though. If you have the CPU/GPU horsepower, you could encode the game's output in x264 (or something of similar compression ratios, but much more response-friendly) in realtime and stream that over the network.
No, you are not so important that everyone cares what you are doing when you are going shopping.
If that's all your friend posts, then don't follow that friend. Problem solved.
Oh yeah, that also solves the spam problem too. Or prevents the one that doesn't yet exist. If someone is spamming you, unfollow. It's like email whitelisting.
Partitioning the drive won't make the test any more fair. It may lessen fragmentation between each "chunk" of the drive than an OS would ordinarily take (if you decided to falsely assume that you can put more than one copy of Windows on a single partition without it blowing up).
Hard drives are cheap, and quite re-usable. Get three identical ones. Do your testing, throw the results online, and then reformat the drives and throw them in the nearest fileserver.
It's not content being provided to the public. It's content being provided to their private network, which you have the option of joining at no cost.
Some social networks opt to have no policing whatsoever, but when push comes to shove, they'll still typically cave in the event of some sort of takedown notice even if they're believed to be in the legal clear (for the reasons you provide). That said, I haven't heard of anyone going to court over it, but I'm pretty sure that the courts would side with the copyright holder if it ever came up.
Maybe I've missed something, but pointing out that some Linux-based servers crashed at midnight on New Years hardly seems like an advertisement to run Linux to me.
Win2k is a decade old. Stable or not, you can't expect companies to go on supporting it forever. On the Mac side, there's a ton of software that's Leopard-only, dropping support for people who are using any OS more than 15 months old, and there's hardly anything wrong with Tiger. Windows has always had better backwards-compatibility than OS X, of course, but eventually the reason that you'll need to upgrade your OS is because all of your software requires it.
Of course what you want to do on your computer is your business, not mine, but just keep in mind that developers are going to stop supporting you eventually if you don't stay at least reasonably current.
Precisely what about IE6 work the way it's supposed to? The plethora of rendering issues aside, it is by far one of the most unstable pieces of software I've ever used. And unless you dig very deep into the Windows processes and force it to run in its own process, it crashes your desktop when it goes down.
XP/Vista, fine. I prefer Office 2007's interface by far, but I've never had any memorable issues with any version of office, going back to at least the Win3.11 days (and for what I do, the functionality there is just fine 99% of the time). But IE6 is broken on so many levels that it's just not funny.
There's nothing illegal, wrong, or problematic about selective litigation - this isn't defense of a trademark. I still think the case is stupid, but you do NOT lose copyright if you don't defend it.
Knowing that I'll be able to get online when I'm on the road (even with a low-quality-but-better-than-dialup connection) is worth a minuscule portion of my tax dollars. Government ventures aren't supposed to be profitable, they're supposed to be beneficial. Not paying ten bucks a day for net access at a hotel definitely falls under 'beneficial' in my books.
In my books that qualifies as identity theft (or at least intentionally misrepresenting yourself online, in the places where that's illegal), but chances are that they'd instead receive a medal from the mayor.
"Sex Offender" != "Child Molester" (!= "Pedophile" for that matter, not that it's relevant)
You can get tagged as the former for getting caught urinating in public in some places. Yeah, I'm fine with banning child molesters from social networks and forcing at least a reasonable degree of transparency in their online activity (I can see no reason they'd have to give up their banking passwords, etc.), but do you think it's fair that someone who got cited for doing something stupid after having a bit too much to drink would have no online privacy, period? Because if so, please get the fuck out of my country.
Maybe you've got old bulbs. Cool white CFLs match daylight pretty well (it looks nasty if it's the only bulb you've switched, but a room full of them always looks like it's being lit with natural sunlight - somewhere around 5500-5700k), and ALL of the warm ones that I've ever seen are a perfect match for the gross yellow of any tungsten bulb out there (around 3800k).
I have several issues with CFLs, but the color temperature has never been one of them.
Sounds about right. We seem to have to replace 6 CFLs for every one incandescent bulb. Any of the non-standard ones seem to be far worse (a dimmable CFL died after less than a day while not even dimmed, a couple of flood-style CFLs are on their way out after only a few months) but the marketing on 5-10x the lifetime of a standard incandescent bulb couldn't be more wrong.
I don't buy the mercury arguments and prefer CFLs for other reasons (I can actually get cool white and daylight bulbs, for one), but my experiences so far definitely give incandescents the win for lifespan. The fact that our electricity bill seems to be RISING as we switch bulbs over to CFLs is probably a separate issue, but we're sure as hell not seeing any energy savings either.
As for shipping, CFLs are quite a bit heavier than a twisted tungsten wire, so shipping a container of CFLs the same distance as a container of incandescent bulbs could well cost more too.
It's honestly not that difficult to do - the real problem would be getting people to switch over. Require all incoming messages to have a micropayment attached (even a tenth of a cent). Ignore messages without the payment. If you read the message and don't flag it as spam, the payment is refunded. If you mark it as spam, you keep the money.
It doesn't stop people from sending spam out, but it kills all of the cost-effectiveness. And to preempt the "but businesses have legitimate bulk mailings!" - places sending out messages to 1m people spend a good chunk of money just designing the newsletter for salaries and everything else. $1k to send a message to a million people, 99.9% of whom will not mark the message as spam and thus refund the micropayment makes it a complete non-issue.
Good luck over-riding two of the most-used protocols on the internet to put it in place (not to mention creating an effective system for micropayments), but at least at a conceptual level it would remove the cost-effectiveness of spam so it would go away.
I think the same principle could go a long way for Youtube comments too. They could finally have enough money coming in to pay for bandwidth:)
It's not even a matter of programming skills. If you look at why spam never gets through to your Gmail inbox, it's because Google has a database of billions if not trillions of messages to run analysis on. When you have a twelve-digit sample size to work with, matching can be done much more accurately than with a couple hundred messages. It's pretty easy to slap together a system where you manually flag messages as good or bad. Being able to call $akismet->isCommentSpam() and have everything done for you programmatically takes not only a huge amount of additional coding skills, but a huge sample set to be even close to accurate.
So indeed, saying that "some of us assist in less direct ways" couldn't be more accurate with spam filtering. Merely flagging incorrectly-marked messages helps everyone.
Maybe in terms of feature-completeness, but IMO Microsoft really did Office 2007's new UI really well (though I certainly see why some people would hate it). My understanding of the Ribbon was that their goal was to expose functionality that's always existed but was hidden too deep to ever be of use - and they certainly did that. Plenty will call it pointless eye candy, but I for one consider it a huge step forward in usability for a product that I too had long considered finished.
Maybe adding in additional features to OO.o would be bloat. Honestly, I don't use any word processors often enough to say (though it handled what I needed the last time I used it). But speeding it up and polishing the UI could go a long way in any software, and twice as much in OpenOffice.
Does Cheney really follow the rules of typical partisan politics? (If so, someone should let him know - he refuses to follow any other rules) He's involved in too many places to go away just because we elected a democrat.
You have a 720p screen (a little more than that, actually), so being able to play HD video - even if not full HD - could be a legitimate concern of yours. I believe the limited selection of iTunes HD content is in 720p, as are a very good proportion of movies and TV shows that you can grab from the seedy parts of the internet.
I'm not so sure that the codecs will be that much of a problem - everything is moving towards h.264/x264, and most content that's not in that is either DivX/XviD or one of the MPEG formats, even if it's in some obscure wrapper. Of course x264 is a bitch to decode relative to the other formats and needs a good strong CPU behind it (or a GPU to which you can offload the decoding), but creating a small box that can handle 1080p x264 playback will be THE standard for a while. Adding in additional formats/codecs/wrappers via software updates shouldn't be much of an issue - beyond that, it's mostly just creating a good interface. I don't particularly care for the look of XBMC (at least the stock one), but that's more of a taste issue than functionality.
Basically, beef up the AppleTV a bit, make it more compatible with formats, and allow users to drag-and-drop content on (or have it scan remote folders) for those that don't want to use iTunes, maybe knock $50 off the price tag and you've got a massive winner. Even without the price drop, it would be a good choice. Certainly more attractive and compact than an Xbox, anyways.
Seriously, when is MS going to get off the same old profit-stump? Is there no one inside that company that can imagine fresh ways to make money besides licensing? Will MS ever come out of the ice age they fostered and find something to sell that the world actually looks forward to paying for?
And your alternative proposal?
You can charge for licenses, charge for usage time (SAAS), or make money from ad revenue (they sure won't get far on donations). Or try a combination of any or all of the three. People tend not to take ads within software too well, though that could mostly be because there's no compelling reason to use the ad-based free systems over the pay-one, no-ads software (I like Google Docs, etc, but it's far too basic for most people, even for typing up school reports). Licenses and SAAS are used by the companies actually making money, such as MS and SalesForce respectively.
I'd love to see some other options, but companies need revenue, and there are only so many ways to get it. You can be as idealistic as you want about it, but MS isn't about to start giving away software without some alternative way to profit from it. There's nothing wrong with that (again, they're a business). But at least today, licenses are a more effective way to profit than ad revenue, especially when you have a product as widely-demanded as MS Office. Sure, I'd be happy to see OpenOffice take over as the dominant software choice, but they exist today mostly as a way to get people to use Sun's products instead of MS - basically a loss leader (open source or not). Hell, I'd prefer if people just threw around plain text formatted with Markdown, but it's not going to happen any time soon.
Until you can propose a better idea than what Microsoft is currently doing or trying, I'd suggest you stop complaining about it. I use MSWord so infrequently that $1.15/hr or whatever is better than buying a full license; I don't see that option disappearing anytime soon. I'd love free as much as the next guy, but monetizing a free product (enough to sustain a business, anyways) is damn hard to start, and borderline impossible without using ads, which are ineffective in desktop software.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but they have explicitly stated that they'll have extension support in Chrome, and will do nothing to stop a port of AdBlock.
I think it's more a matter of engineering resources. When you're a web-centric company, you'll do anything in your power to bring about the death of IE6.
Have you tried 7? That early alpha that leaked from PDC worked better than Vista ever has for me, never mind a proper beta.
Windows 7 isn't Vista, it's what Vista should always have been. Yes, it largely copies Vista's UI, but it also makes a lot of nice but subtle enhancements on the original, including performance and not such an insanely overbearing UAC security model. In my limited testing, 7's UAC is much closer to how it shows up in OS X and Linux, at least in terms of frequency (whether the security model it represents is actually solid remains to be seen).
Assuming that major hardware manufacturers don't fuck it up with bad drivers again, anyways. In my experience, that's largely what killed Vista. We're going on two years now I think, and I still can't get a proper not-broken Vista driver from nVidia, on a then-new GPU.
As a Mac user... I certainly won't say that 7 is perfect (nor is OS X), but it certainly shows that Microsoft has been taking a lot of the bad feedback for Vista to heart. And quite frankly, I'd like to see heavy 7 adoption among Windows users if for no other reason than it comes bundled with the standards-compliant IE8.
Some Mac software developer claimed to do this a while ago on his small commercial product (a completely harmless dialog box saying something to the effect of "pirated key detected, erasing your hard drive"). He had to open-source the product - thereby completely killing its revenue stream - just to save face, and suffice to say a lot of people that remember the incident better than I avoid any software from this developer.
I assure you, NOT all publicity is good publicity, despite sayings to the contrary.
So go for it, but don't be surprised if it ends up completely killing the product. It sounds like you've got some sort of enterprisey product, and I guarantee that no sane company would even risk continuing to use your product (never mind getting any future business) if there was even the slightest risk of that happening.
It's a trojan - you have no idea what else it's doing. If all it does is screw with your HOSTS file and play a stupid audio track I agree, but it could be doing all sorts of other unknown fun stuff to your machine with the root access it has.
You think this is so you don't have to buy a new graphics card? The only reason companies would go for this is because it changes their games from a product to a service, so piracy goes away. Next-gen DRM, if you will (next-gen doesn't have to be worse, however; I avoid buying games due to how invasive the DRM is and know plenty of people who do the same, so the next generation of the stuff damn well better address that).
If it's implemented correctly it would still offer us advantages - play from any computer with a net connection (meaning proper gaming on Linux and Mac, as you'd need just a client to interface with their app, not the low-level DirectX APIs) would be enough for me. I see publishers taking a Zune-esque approach where you could get unlimited access to any of their games for some standard monthly fee (which makes a lot more sense with games than music anyways). Making stuff cheap, easy, and accessible goes a long way when the only downside to your competition is that it's illegal, especially when people don't seem to care if the numbers you can spot at ThePirateBay are anything to go by.
As for the implementation issues, I'll second the VNC analogy. Of course, it seems to be less responsive than either Microsoft or Apple's implementation of system-specific remote desktop software, but that comes down to encoding tricks (like only re-sending parts of the screen that actually changed, or a more procedural-type "draw a standard app window with this text at point X,Y" sharing rather than sending jpegs across the wires). It hardly matters for gaming though - I *have* tried gaming over VNC, ARD, and RDC, and even over wired gig-e you can't get a smooth picture, let alone something responsive. I think that's more of a CPU bandwidth issue than a network one, though. If you have the CPU/GPU horsepower, you could encode the game's output in x264 (or something of similar compression ratios, but much more response-friendly) in realtime and stream that over the network.
No, you are not so important that everyone cares what you are doing when you are going shopping.
If that's all your friend posts, then don't follow that friend. Problem solved.
Oh yeah, that also solves the spam problem too. Or prevents the one that doesn't yet exist. If someone is spamming you, unfollow. It's like email whitelisting.
Partitioning the drive won't make the test any more fair. It may lessen fragmentation between each "chunk" of the drive than an OS would ordinarily take (if you decided to falsely assume that you can put more than one copy of Windows on a single partition without it blowing up).
Hard drives are cheap, and quite re-usable. Get three identical ones. Do your testing, throw the results online, and then reformat the drives and throw them in the nearest fileserver.
It's not content being provided to the public. It's content being provided to their private network, which you have the option of joining at no cost.
Some social networks opt to have no policing whatsoever, but when push comes to shove, they'll still typically cave in the event of some sort of takedown notice even if they're believed to be in the legal clear (for the reasons you provide). That said, I haven't heard of anyone going to court over it, but I'm pretty sure that the courts would side with the copyright holder if it ever came up.
Maybe I've missed something, but pointing out that some Linux-based servers crashed at midnight on New Years hardly seems like an advertisement to run Linux to me.
Win2k is a decade old. Stable or not, you can't expect companies to go on supporting it forever. On the Mac side, there's a ton of software that's Leopard-only, dropping support for people who are using any OS more than 15 months old, and there's hardly anything wrong with Tiger. Windows has always had better backwards-compatibility than OS X, of course, but eventually the reason that you'll need to upgrade your OS is because all of your software requires it.
Of course what you want to do on your computer is your business, not mine, but just keep in mind that developers are going to stop supporting you eventually if you don't stay at least reasonably current.
Precisely what about IE6 work the way it's supposed to? The plethora of rendering issues aside, it is by far one of the most unstable pieces of software I've ever used. And unless you dig very deep into the Windows processes and force it to run in its own process, it crashes your desktop when it goes down.
XP/Vista, fine. I prefer Office 2007's interface by far, but I've never had any memorable issues with any version of office, going back to at least the Win3.11 days (and for what I do, the functionality there is just fine 99% of the time). But IE6 is broken on so many levels that it's just not funny.
There's nothing illegal, wrong, or problematic about selective litigation - this isn't defense of a trademark. I still think the case is stupid, but you do NOT lose copyright if you don't defend it.
Knowing that I'll be able to get online when I'm on the road (even with a low-quality-but-better-than-dialup connection) is worth a minuscule portion of my tax dollars. Government ventures aren't supposed to be profitable, they're supposed to be beneficial. Not paying ten bucks a day for net access at a hotel definitely falls under 'beneficial' in my books.
In my books that qualifies as identity theft (or at least intentionally misrepresenting yourself online, in the places where that's illegal), but chances are that they'd instead receive a medal from the mayor.
"Sex Offender" != "Child Molester" (!= "Pedophile" for that matter, not that it's relevant)
You can get tagged as the former for getting caught urinating in public in some places. Yeah, I'm fine with banning child molesters from social networks and forcing at least a reasonable degree of transparency in their online activity (I can see no reason they'd have to give up their banking passwords, etc.), but do you think it's fair that someone who got cited for doing something stupid after having a bit too much to drink would have no online privacy, period? Because if so, please get the fuck out of my country.
Maybe you've got old bulbs. Cool white CFLs match daylight pretty well (it looks nasty if it's the only bulb you've switched, but a room full of them always looks like it's being lit with natural sunlight - somewhere around 5500-5700k), and ALL of the warm ones that I've ever seen are a perfect match for the gross yellow of any tungsten bulb out there (around 3800k).
I have several issues with CFLs, but the color temperature has never been one of them.
Sounds about right. We seem to have to replace 6 CFLs for every one incandescent bulb. Any of the non-standard ones seem to be far worse (a dimmable CFL died after less than a day while not even dimmed, a couple of flood-style CFLs are on their way out after only a few months) but the marketing on 5-10x the lifetime of a standard incandescent bulb couldn't be more wrong.
I don't buy the mercury arguments and prefer CFLs for other reasons (I can actually get cool white and daylight bulbs, for one), but my experiences so far definitely give incandescents the win for lifespan. The fact that our electricity bill seems to be RISING as we switch bulbs over to CFLs is probably a separate issue, but we're sure as hell not seeing any energy savings either.
As for shipping, CFLs are quite a bit heavier than a twisted tungsten wire, so shipping a container of CFLs the same distance as a container of incandescent bulbs could well cost more too.
It's honestly not that difficult to do - the real problem would be getting people to switch over. Require all incoming messages to have a micropayment attached (even a tenth of a cent). Ignore messages without the payment. If you read the message and don't flag it as spam, the payment is refunded. If you mark it as spam, you keep the money.
It doesn't stop people from sending spam out, but it kills all of the cost-effectiveness. And to preempt the "but businesses have legitimate bulk mailings!" - places sending out messages to 1m people spend a good chunk of money just designing the newsletter for salaries and everything else. $1k to send a message to a million people, 99.9% of whom will not mark the message as spam and thus refund the micropayment makes it a complete non-issue.
Good luck over-riding two of the most-used protocols on the internet to put it in place (not to mention creating an effective system for micropayments), but at least at a conceptual level it would remove the cost-effectiveness of spam so it would go away.
I think the same principle could go a long way for Youtube comments too. They could finally have enough money coming in to pay for bandwidth :)
It's not even a matter of programming skills. If you look at why spam never gets through to your Gmail inbox, it's because Google has a database of billions if not trillions of messages to run analysis on. When you have a twelve-digit sample size to work with, matching can be done much more accurately than with a couple hundred messages. It's pretty easy to slap together a system where you manually flag messages as good or bad. Being able to call $akismet->isCommentSpam() and have everything done for you programmatically takes not only a huge amount of additional coding skills, but a huge sample set to be even close to accurate.
So indeed, saying that "some of us assist in less direct ways" couldn't be more accurate with spam filtering. Merely flagging incorrectly-marked messages helps everyone.
Maybe in terms of feature-completeness, but IMO Microsoft really did Office 2007's new UI really well (though I certainly see why some people would hate it). My understanding of the Ribbon was that their goal was to expose functionality that's always existed but was hidden too deep to ever be of use - and they certainly did that. Plenty will call it pointless eye candy, but I for one consider it a huge step forward in usability for a product that I too had long considered finished.
Maybe adding in additional features to OO.o would be bloat. Honestly, I don't use any word processors often enough to say (though it handled what I needed the last time I used it). But speeding it up and polishing the UI could go a long way in any software, and twice as much in OpenOffice.
Does Cheney really follow the rules of typical partisan politics? (If so, someone should let him know - he refuses to follow any other rules) He's involved in too many places to go away just because we elected a democrat.
I hear you can't look at porn on the White House computers. NOW does it sound impressive?
You have a 720p screen (a little more than that, actually), so being able to play HD video - even if not full HD - could be a legitimate concern of yours. I believe the limited selection of iTunes HD content is in 720p, as are a very good proportion of movies and TV shows that you can grab from the seedy parts of the internet.
I'm not so sure that the codecs will be that much of a problem - everything is moving towards h.264/x264, and most content that's not in that is either DivX/XviD or one of the MPEG formats, even if it's in some obscure wrapper. Of course x264 is a bitch to decode relative to the other formats and needs a good strong CPU behind it (or a GPU to which you can offload the decoding), but creating a small box that can handle 1080p x264 playback will be THE standard for a while. Adding in additional formats/codecs/wrappers via software updates shouldn't be much of an issue - beyond that, it's mostly just creating a good interface. I don't particularly care for the look of XBMC (at least the stock one), but that's more of a taste issue than functionality.
Basically, beef up the AppleTV a bit, make it more compatible with formats, and allow users to drag-and-drop content on (or have it scan remote folders) for those that don't want to use iTunes, maybe knock $50 off the price tag and you've got a massive winner. Even without the price drop, it would be a good choice. Certainly more attractive and compact than an Xbox, anyways.
And your alternative proposal?
You can charge for licenses, charge for usage time (SAAS), or make money from ad revenue (they sure won't get far on donations). Or try a combination of any or all of the three. People tend not to take ads within software too well, though that could mostly be because there's no compelling reason to use the ad-based free systems over the pay-one, no-ads software (I like Google Docs, etc, but it's far too basic for most people, even for typing up school reports). Licenses and SAAS are used by the companies actually making money, such as MS and SalesForce respectively.
I'd love to see some other options, but companies need revenue, and there are only so many ways to get it. You can be as idealistic as you want about it, but MS isn't about to start giving away software without some alternative way to profit from it. There's nothing wrong with that (again, they're a business). But at least today, licenses are a more effective way to profit than ad revenue, especially when you have a product as widely-demanded as MS Office. Sure, I'd be happy to see OpenOffice take over as the dominant software choice, but they exist today mostly as a way to get people to use Sun's products instead of MS - basically a loss leader (open source or not). Hell, I'd prefer if people just threw around plain text formatted with Markdown, but it's not going to happen any time soon.
Until you can propose a better idea than what Microsoft is currently doing or trying, I'd suggest you stop complaining about it. I use MSWord so infrequently that $1.15/hr or whatever is better than buying a full license; I don't see that option disappearing anytime soon. I'd love free as much as the next guy, but monetizing a free product (enough to sustain a business, anyways) is damn hard to start, and borderline impossible without using ads, which are ineffective in desktop software.