Says Microsoft Executive to the BBC.
Around the same time as hackers were exploiting an unpatched security hole in Office 2003 a UK Microsoft executive was telling the BBC about the ‘reliability and dependability that comes from a commercial software model’.
He may have a point but it wasn’t the best time to talk about reliability of Microsoft products. Plenty of people jumped on the Microsoft bashing bandwagon.
Commercial software like Microsoft Office is probably more reliable than open source equivalents like OpenOffice.org, by most yardsticks, though it’s an endlessly debatable point. That doesn’t mean that all commercial products are better than open source alternatives.
The real issue is whether the cost of the commercial program is worth the additional ‘reliability and dependability’ (assuming features you need are in both products).
If your needs are modest then the no-cost OpenOffice is a viable alternative to paying $130 minimum (the Student and Teacher edition) for Microsoft Office 2003.
