And OpenOffice.org allows you to save that newly liberated data in the world's only open standard XML format, in nice clear, easily parsed text. Which is why OpenOffice.org was selected by the National Archives of Australia as the platform of choice for the long-term storage of our country's documents of importance. A job that surely can't be trusted to Microsoft's proprietary formats.

I could go on. Firefox is available on Windows, while Internet Explorer isn't available on Linux. The Gimp is available on Windows, while none of Microsoft's graphics apps are offered for Linux. Scribus, an excellent entry-level desktop publishing suite runs on Windows. MS Publisher doesn't return the compliment for Linux. Apache? MySQL? PostreSQL?  Sendmail? All run on Windows as well as on Linux. Microsoft's IIS, MS SQL Server and Exchange, refuse to consider Linux. Programming languages? There are perhaps 50 open source interpreters and compilers which support Windows - not one of Microsoft's supports Linux.

While Microsoft goes out of its way to curb your every opportunity to migrate away from Windows, the open source community makes every effort to be platform agnostic and ecumenical, once again, giving you as a user, control. The upshot of all this comparison? If there's a reason why you're finding it hard to migrate to Linux, if there's a reason why you find Linux difficult or strange, if there's a reason why you can't find Linux apps that can read your data, the answer is you. You're the one who didn't think before adopting one piece of the mono-platform proprietary jigsaw puzzle after another - be it a lock-in user-interface, data or document format or OS-specific app. By not thinking clearly, carefully and with some serious mid-to-long term critical analysis, you've locked yourself into paying way more for what is now commodity software technology.

Is there a way out? Is there a way to migrate most of your business to mainstream open source commodity software technology? You bet. Here's how.

Most organisations need to don strategic thinking caps when it comes to migrating away from Microsoft Office or Windows. Very few know how to do this. Moving away from either Microsoft franchise is a multi-year exercise, and unless you plan to make it happen, it will never just 'happen'. Unless businesses take it upon themselves to continuously refresh their outlook on what technologies exist out there which can offer them platform and application flexibility in future, they wont have the vision and long-term planning necessary to strive for change.
Here's what I mean by this. When it comes time to decide upon that next application or software solution your business needs, make sure that the technology you choose can run on more than just Windows. Same goes for the next software procurement. And the next. If you do this for long enough, say 3-5 years, you will likely end up with few applications which are locked into the Windows-only API.

Your next step should be to introduce Firefox on your Windows desktops. Migrate all your Internet Explorer bookmarks and user data, shake out any IE-only dependencies your business has and banish IE use for every site except that handful that are IE-specific. You'll be amazed at the reduction in security issues through this simple step....more

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Also see
Novell: it’s the Linux desktop user stupid – part 1
Maddog says desktop the final frontier for Linux