Dominic raised the issue of legacy documents while commenting on my previous post, on the disaggregation of the desktop.
Ric followed up with some comments relating to weaning enterprises off Microsoft Office.
This is something that has been bothering me for some years now, and the deja vu sensations weren’t enjoyable. And it got me thinking. Somewhere inside my head, there is no difference between my buying a song via the iTunes store and my creating a spreadsheet via Microsoft Excel.
With iTunes, everyone’s up in arms. Everyone understands that DRM of that sort is not a good thing. And people find ways of unlocking the music.
How come people don’t feel the same way about Office documents? Isn’t that a form of DRM? How come nobody objects? How come we don’t have clever people finding ways of freeing up such documents from their lock-ins? After all, there is a tangible measurable market for such migration tools. A huge market.
Nature abhors a vacuum.