Being Thankful for Free Software Developers
I wish it was that attractive to just switch from “expensive and evil proprietary software” as the author suggests.<p>1. The article claims that Microsoft Office 365 is $100 a year. In reality it&#x27;s about $70, home license for up to 5 users is $80.<p>2. The article does not mention that every Office 365 user gets bunch of additional services. For example, a tebibyte of space in Microsoft OneDrive for each user, 60 Skype minutes per month, etc.<p>3. Each Office 365 user can install Office apps on 3 devices: his phone, tablet, and computer. Office apps are available on Android and iOS as part of the package. $70—$80 a year price tag includes not only Windows apps, they work perfectly fine on smartphones. Personally I make grocery lists in Excel, open them on my phone, fill my shopping cart with items, and track how much I&#x27;m going to pay or if I&#x27;m eligible for coupons.<p>4. I&#x27;m not aware of any decent OneNote alternatives. I researched it some time ago because I desired to self-host my notes. There are pretty much no comparable open source or free cross-platform apps which can work with notes in cloud or on a remote server from your mobile device. With OneNote all of my notes are available on my mobile devices. I strongly believe that OneNote is one of the best apps Microsoft came up with in recent years.<p>If you look around, you can see that 1 TiB of cloud storage alone costs $100 (Google Drive) or $120 (Dropbox). Office 365 offers not only that but also quite possibly the best office suite on the market for $70 for 1 or $80 for 5 people.<p>Note that so far I have not touched the question of quality of software at all — only the most basic functionality and packages. Microsoft Office is the most popular office software package for a reason. My exposure to open-source office packages is limited but here is at least one dealbreaking example. I tried recreating my spreadsheet for tracking caloric intake in LibreOffice Calc. It was extremely painful — among many other features Calc does not even support tables like Excel does.<p>I use another software package mentioned in the article — Kaspersky. I&#x27;m going to assume the author is talking about the package I&#x27;m using — Kaspersky Internet Security — since the price is stated to be $40.<p>Like with Office 365, KIS is not only an antivirus. It&#x27;s also a firewall, parental control tool with a list of inappropriate websites, an adblocker, etc. It provides quite a lot of functionality, some of which, frankly speaking, should be in Windows itself. For example, KIS can autoupdate software.<p>Like with Office 365, article does not mention that $40 buys you a license for up to 3 devices. KIS is also available for Android and macOS.<p>But overall, an antivirus is not necessary in modern Windows system, so you may skip on these $40.