Get Office Free With OpenOffice

Software is a funny thing. It can be copied endlessly, which is great if you're a consumer but if you're selling software, it can be a nightmare. For example, what if you were a carpenter and built one redwood picnic table featuring beautiful inlays depicting scenes from Pee-Wee Herman's Big Adventure. You delivered it to your customer on Monday only to see 100 copies of it all over town on Tuesday. You bet you would find ways to tell the copies from the genuine article and to seek some recourse for the copies.

Software makers use serial numbers for this purpose. During installation the serial number is checked and if it's not valid, you can't use all the features of the software. This works for about 5 minutes followed closely by the distributed copying of mountains of CDs with serial numbers scribbled in Sharpie.

Clearly serial numbers alone don’t work. That’s why the recent advent of software activation is so popular. Activation makes sure each copy is installed only once by having the software “phone home.” The result is a way higher percentage of people paying for Office software than ever before.

Paying for software is the right thing to do. There’s just something missing in this activation equation. While the price of Windows is included in new computers, Office has always been an expensive but necessary add-on. Since many people don't want to pay $250 or more for Word and Excel, they haven't.

Allow me to speculate. If you took the number of copies of Office in use and divided the total revenues from Office by that huge number, the actual price people have been paying for Office is probably closer to $100 than to $250 or more. I think people would gladly pay that $100 but Microsoft has no reason to drop the price now that they are finally making sure they get their money.

If it weren’t for one key development, I’d say they were right. Open Office. Open Office aims to replace Microsoft Office and make itself available to everyone in the world for free. Open Office allows you to open and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files with only minor differences for most users. Since it is under constant improvement by developers and users alike, the more people use it, the faster the pace of development will grow. Just go to OpenOffice.org to download the latest version.

Open Office can save you some money and release you from future purchases of Microsoft Office. Whether you use it or not, you will reap the benefits as Office software is pushed to include more of the features you want at lower prices. More directly, the money you save using Open Office can be used to get better trained on the Internet or to backup all the photos and music you're saving.