HI, Mark,
I have already read one article in which a sales manager on a business
trip had installed a copy of the current MS office suite of record,
MicroSoft Office XP.  All the features necessary to make this into one of
those buy and subscribe services is already present in this product, you
don't have to wait for Windows XP to be released on October 25 to
experience it, according to the article.  The particular copy of Office XP
was installed on his laptop computer, and during a transcontinental
flight, he hot-swapped network cards in one of the PC-card slots to
connect with the internet port provided on the flight.  The program locked
him out so that he could not save any changes to the documents or files on
which he was working, and a few other necessary features were locked out.
When the man landed and got to his hotel, he had to contact MicroSoft and
explain was had happened and get them to give him a new authorization code
for the office suite and walk him through the procedure for downloading
the code and installing it such that the program worked again.  Maybe this
was not supposed to happen in this particular copy of Office XP, since the
writer of the article was in the U.S.  However, there is one very
sophistocated, up-to-date small market where MicroSoft is already
implementing this software subscription "service" beginning with their
Office XP product.  That small market is New Zealand.  New Zealand ,
whether they like it or not, is now a guinea pig for MicroSoft in testing
how this nifty little concept will work in real life.

By the way, there is already a very strong and rapidly accellerating
movement among systems administrators in various academic, government, and
"non-governmental organization, (NGO)" circles in Europe away from
MicroSoft World the entire so-called "WinTel" duopoly vision of the
personal computer world, in favor of such open source alternatives as the
Norwegian Linus Torvald's Linux operating system and the free or nearly
free office suites and other software packages that run under it.  Several
versions of DOS are still very much alive and well and still being
maintained and updated by their developers, and many people have decided
to stop with whatever is their current flavor of Windows.

One of the reasons MicroSoft is so keen on this subscription model is that
they think too many millions of people are still using Windows 95 even
though it has now been an officially abandonned and unsupported and
illegal to sell operating environment since the beginning of last
November.  Even in the business world, companies were not quick enough to
adopt the even superior Windows 2000 over the Windows NT product it was
supposed to replace, and Windows ME was a relative yawn as far as
MicroSoft is concerned, with too many people deliberately opting to stick
with Windows 98 2nd edition with updates and security patches.

The security issue, especially in the corporate world, is another major
problem driving people away from MicroSoft's Windows products.  Every two
or three days you learn about another major and serious security hole in
MicroSoft's operating systems, including Windows 2000 and in the MicroSoft
products that run under it, problems which can be avoided altogether by
systems administrators with even a relatively small amount of knowledge
and the Linux and various Unix operating systems.

If your computer is connected on any kind of network where any files or
data or peripherals can be shared, and that network is based on any
version of any MicroSoft operating system, your system is absolutely,
positively, NOT! secure even from teenage hackers with a few cracker
programs and routines readily available on the Internet.  MicroSoft proves
on an almost weekly basis that they are incapable of protecting even their
own internal network systems against breakins and malicious hackers, yet
you are supposed to trust them and know how safe you are when you connect
your entire system into MicroSoft's network for them to analyze your
system and sell you a new service to use their operating system and office
suite and web browser and other apps which you still have to go out and
buy in addition to paying your regular subscription.  All this and the
so-called "computer press" is still fixated on an antitrust suit over
wrong done to a competing web browser which has been a has-been and a
non-issue for at least three years.  Welcome to the Brave New World!


Brent Reynolds
Random Access Internet Shell account
Standard disclaimers apply.
Email: [log in to unmask]


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html