baldysblog.co.uk

In my years in the IT Industry, I have often loaded “unlicensed copies of proprietary software” as have most of my fellow IT workers although frankly, as these are ‘industrial programs’ of little direct use to an end user, it hardly matters. Personally I have always followed a simple code of conduct on software which can be summarised as follows :

If of “personal interest” I have no problem in ‘loading evaluation software’ and deciding if I want to use it. If I decide that it meets my personal needs, I will buy a legitimate copy and the Software Industry has long realised this so that they now do ‘supported’ 30 day free trial downloads. However, just where are we going here… ?

The Current “American Model”

Is very difficult for both the IT Industry and, the US economy based as it is, upon a “sue crazy society” and an internal market of +300 million people to deal with the “current reality” which means that the days of Microsoft dominance, have already passed as previously in their time IBM before them did and the US of A needs to catch up with what that means to them.

It is a very real problem. Under US Law, disgruntled stockholders could launch legal action against a business and its Board on a ‘no win , no fee basis’ for absolutely nothing in terms of costs to them personally. Whilst that is all well and fine in ‘policing’ “wrongful behaviour”, what about the shades of grey in between and what about tomorrow when the US is no longer dominant and a totally different ‘business model’ emerges ?

The problem for both American companies and American citizens is very simple: All the biggest and best software companies right now may well be ‘American’ but; for the 330,000,000 people who live in the US and may use computers, in China there are 1.3 billion, India about a billion and they have no need to stick with “MS Windows” and most likely wont.

Future Directions for Emerging Economies.

Whether ‘Communist China’ or the ‘new’ and emerging economies where computing power is so important for both military and economic growth, would you choose to have your computing platform dependent upon the US when a free and unfettered alternative in the shape of Linux exists ? The answer must be, of course not.

China having got control of all electronic manufacturing and India, a major if not, the major software development country in the world, how long before the US becomes a very minor player globally in the development and supply of software ?

Even if the various companies and their management can see this coming, the American legal system leaves them powerless to respond effectively, the ‘future’ is most definitely NOT Windows.But it is not just in sales to India and China where US software companies will be hit, they will also lose their Western markets too as better product at better prices become available. An example is that both Microsoft and Adobe charge their UK customers far more money for their products than they do to US customers

A Personal Perspective

Last week I rebuilt a PC in terms of a new motherboard and processor, no problem but it meant reinstalling all my software from the operating system onwards which is always a tedious event if only because it takes so long in-between installing individual programs, getting them ‘re-authorized’ and then ‘service patched’ to bring it all up to date, we are talking hours here and naturally, it doesn’t go smoothly.

Because of my love of photography, Adobe Photoshop is probably one of my most important programs and I had a back up copy on this particular PC prior to the rebuild should it ever be required and my main PC for this purpose, had a problem. In the rebuild this got trashed and the on-line authorization wouldn’t work “…you have exceeded the number of times…” and so on.

Okay, I could have gone through an argument with Adobe over this until I got my “two copy rights” re-instated but I thought why bother, I can have that argument if my other PC goes down ? Why not do something else ?

If I Could…

Like many knowledgeable PC users, if I could ‘dump’ my personal dependency on programs like Adobe Photoshop and Autodesk Max, I would switch to Linux overnight and get rid of Windows completely. Between web browsing, e-mail and ‘Office’ applications which make up the majority use for probably 80% of PC users, there is absolutely no need to run any form of Windows, any version of Linux can do that for you with free software and free on-line updates as the success of the Asus EEEPC shows.

I suspect that there are very few users who couldn’t right now, abandon MS Office completely and switch to “Open Office” instead which if I was dealing with a pan-national situation such as software for schools, is what I would do without a thought.

Halfway There

As part of my forward planning for going back to work after my Mother has died, is the thought that teaching people how to manipulate digital photographs, might be a possibility. I use Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop but at £200 for the former and over £500 a new licence for the latter, would potential “students” most of whom will be retired, want to pay out that sort of cash plus, be prepared to put the effort in to learn it ?

Adobe do a strip down version called “Photoshop Elements” which is very good but one can hardly imagine that it needs much ‘teaching’ it is both as sophisticated and idiot proof as it can be so nothing much in that for me. However, there is another product which has been around awhile and could in theory match Photoshop to a large extent “Corel Paint Shop Pro X2″ and I bought a copy for just under £42 as opposed to Photoshop CS3 for just over £500.

Is it any good ?

The answer is that it is not as sophisticated as Photoshop nor as fast at rendering RAW files but for the rest and for over 80% of users, particularly the hobby market, it would be difficult to justify spending £500 on Photoshop rather than £42 on Paint Shop Pro and whilst that puts it in the Photoshop Elements bracket pricewise, Paint Shop Pro is far more flexible and capable than Elements. We live in interesting times where the days of American software domination may well be over.

They need a new business model which may see “purchase prices” replaced with annual subscriptions, I have one already. I use a 3D animation package from Autodesk called Max, I pay an annual subscription and get my software upgraded to the latest version automatically and without any additional cost, in rough terms, the annual fee is about 10% of the one off purchase price.

Now if only it ran on Linux…