Every day I take the time to read my iGoogle. It has my weather, news, email and RSS feeds. There is no better place to get my daily dose of informationm and kudos to Google for managing to provide such an excellent facility. I’m aware other sites can provide similar, but they tend to be filled with a lot of extra crap I really don’t want – popups and the like.

Today I bumped into http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/7545722/A-third-of-people-think-it-is-acceptable-to-pirate-software.html – an article based on Microsoft research. Apparently most people use pirated software. My last employer used pirated Windows Server, pirated Windows XP on every workstation, pirated Adobe CS3 suite, pirated Microsoft Office.

For the record, I use a legal Windows XP for gaming and entertainment, and Ubuntu for everything else. I even get my music through Spotify – I expect my sainthood any moment! If anyone has any tips for Spotify randomly crashing in Wine, that’d be lovely.

If Microsoft’s poll wasn’t so blatantly a political move in light of the Digital Britain legislation, one might suggest they change the focus and find that actually, 99% of people use pirated software, without issues. They quote figures relating to viruses and crashes, presumably in the hope it’ll scare people off. I often wonder if the Microsoft execs don’t live in a different world. Infact, I’m sure they do. While I’m on the subject, I have an old friend who works for Microsoft, I’m going to point him here and seek his anonymous feedback.

On a slight tangent: How do people start up using industry standard software, when such software is quite so expensive? I want to type a piece here about Photoshop and Gimp (yes, there’s Paint Shop Pro etc, etc. Photoshop and Gimp are the big boys of proprietary and free in my world). There’s lots to be said for cost of ownership – free support in Windows and paid-for support in Linux, and it’d be a never ending debate. In the grand scheme of things, Photoshop is known by many and despite the initial cost, you may employ trained people quickly. Gimp is less known and has training costs, and potentially harder to recruit for.

Anyway, I’ve rambled through this entire post. I don’t know what the answer is. I DO know, I won’t pay for Windows 7 or Photoshop while Ubuntu / Windows XP and Gimp will suffice. I really hope http://www.reactos.org/ gets somewhere, though I imagine it’ll suffer similar fates to DR DOS and the AARD debacle (look it up).