Fighting the ribbon

Apple's new "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials are hilarious — particularly because they target all that is wrong with Windows Vista — and well, there's a lot of that. My first impression of Vista was merely aesthetic; it looked suspiciously familiar. Now that I'm more experienced with Vista, I know enough to know why Apple's commercials are hilarious. But actually, Vista's not as bad as the commercials make it seem, and it's still similar enough to XP to be user-friendly to longtime Windows users. Office 2007, the companion suite to Vista, is a different matter entirely. The main problem I see with both Vista and Office 2007 is the near impossibility of choosing not to upgrade to them.

Go to any Best Buy or CompUSA, and you'll notice that almost all new PCs already come prepackaged with Vista — the only model I saw that came with XP was so technologically obsolete that it probably wasn't capable of running Vista in the first place. Now try another game: Try and find a legitimate copy of Office 2003 for purchase. Microsoft hasn't made it easy for consumers who want to go back to do so.

Perhaps I would not be so concerned with the hurdles keeping PC-users from buying the older version had Office 2007 not been infuriatingly inferior to the older version. It is easy to see what Microsoft was thinking when they got rid of the familiar toolbars and replaced them with "the Ribbon." They simply wanted to make Office more user-friendly. Of course, somewhere in their thought process, they ignored the fact that toolbars are standard in the PC world — anyone who had used the program before ought to be comfortable in a toolbar world. The people who really might benefit from the switch to the Ribbon are those who have never before used a Windows product in their lives, and I'm not really sure why Microsoft would target them. For the experienced user who has managed to customize the toolbars to fit his or her needs, the Ribbon is a nightmare.

Of course, irrespective of whether the Ribbon is a good innovation or not, it seems likely that it will triumph. By ceasing distribution of Office 2003, Microsoft has done great damage to Office 2007's only would-be major competitor and, subsequently, severely lessened the possibility that market forces would push against the Ribbon. The consumer, of course, is not completely powerless. He or she can choose not to upgrade at all. If that is not an option, he or she can attempt to obtain a copy of the previous Office through vendors like eBay or simply switch over to free software suites like OpenOffice. Of course, each of these comes with a great deal of trouble and risk. The shortcomings of eBay of course, are evident, but what's wrong with freeware? Namely, that it's not completely compatible with the standard. And that, of course, is also a problem. Microsoft's near monopoly on certain software applications is naturally convenient. I can send my .doc (beware of .docx, however) to my preceptor, and be fairly certain that he too will have Word, and so my paper will look fairly similar on his screen. The price for this convenience is great: If everyone is running the same software, then everyone is susceptible to the same bugs and viruses. But the problem transcends even that point. The fact that almost everyone, including large corporations and universities, is running the same software puts dissenters at a huge disadvantage, which at the end of the day may mean that it's simply not worth it to switch to freeware. It's something of a prisoner's dilemma.

To solve this problem, copyright laws should be changed so that companies' exclusive claims to their intellectual property would be voided when they remove their products from the market. In fact, this proposal could be useful for other mediums. Naturally, the idea needs a good deal of tinkering and fine tuning, but some version of it might be a good balance between the interests of consumers and those of the corporations. At the very least, such a measure might protect users from forced "upgrades" to inferior software. Martha Vega-Gonzalez is a history major from New York, NY. She can be reached at mvega@princeton.edu.