First blawg from the new job here. One of my first big tasks is to figure out how to migrate a heap of e-mail from Mozilla back to Outlook. Actually, let me back up a bit there. The guy who was here before me, as the back office IT guy, left on fairly short notice, was the only one who really knew how this stuff worked, and was pretty much thought of as indispensible – as I think I’ve said, there’s plenty of irony to be had in the comedic twist of me leaving the station and then finding myself picking up the pieces for such a person. Anyway, this guy was Mr. Open Source. He either uninstalled or rendered completely unusable Microsoft Office, Outlook, Explorer, what have you, and switched everything over to the Mozilla family or to OpenOffice.org. Now, that’s all fine and dandy, except that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he was ever actually specifically asked to do this switcheroo. And what’s more, while the near-beer open source Office knockoff can read Word and Excel files just fine, exporting to those formats is a different bird entirely; it exports humongous files, far bigger than the same exact things would be as Word or Excel files, and loses formatting. It’s either clumsily programmed, or it’s as if they’re penalizing you for trying to go back to Microsoft.
I’m not a Microsoft cheerleader, okay? But for office software, it’s damn near a universal standard. If a file I generate that’s supposedly Word-compatible isn’t, that’s going to create a logjam when I have to e-mail something outside of the building. (Or inside, for that matter – no other machine here has this same odd train wreck of open source stuff installed on it.) Love it or hate it, if you’re in business, there’s either “the behemoth” or there’s “sticking it to the man in such a way that your clients will have a hard time looking at anything you send them.” Which, hey, that’s great that you’re sticking it to the man, but you’re probably losing money, if not clientele, while you’re doing it. Congratulations.
Migrating e-mail from Thunderbird back to Outlook is looking like it could be a whole other full-time job. I’ve found one program that, by all reports, does the trick, but it’s kinda pricey for something that would, essentially, be used once and then put back on the shelf. What I don’t get is this: if open source is the wave of the future, and the end to software monopolies, yadda yadda yadda, why is it easier to export mail from Outlook to another mail client than it is to get that same mail out of Thunderbird and back into Outlook? Again, I get the gut feeling that I’m either looking at shoddy programming or some vague attempt to punish anyone who would dare re-align their allegiances with Microsoft.
Remember the South Park episode about hybrid cars, where a cloud of “smug” smothers whole cities to the sound of George Clooney’s self-important Oscar acceptance speech? I’m really starting to feel the same way about open source software. Are we trying to break a monopoly here…or are we just jealous that we’re not that monopoly?… Read more
