Tonight's anecdote comes courtesy of Big Jeff, hockey dad and high-end home remodeler. Jeff runs his own company, owns a variety of computing devices, does his own books (via a commercial software product) and is generally pretty hard on mechanical things. Tonight Jeff announced "I got no bahs" to a rather horrified group of hockey parents. Deductive reasoning train: Jeff is from the Boston area. He moved but his accent and Red Sox allegiances did not. The local Verizon Wireless cell seemed to have disappeared about half an hour earlier. Jeff indeed had no bars, nor did any of us. And here I feared he'd had another construction accident like the one that left him with nine and a half fingers (He still doesn't get the Frodo references, but it's just because he's a regular guy).
I forgot to wear my "I will not fix your computer" shirt to hockey practice tonight, so the conversation turned from cellular service to backing up files on CD-ah. Jeff and I worked on this a little last week after a practice, and tonight he reported progress in the recordable media area but regression in terms of opening up some old text documents. Jeff's immediate reaction: "Do I have to buy more softwaaah?"
Jeff has a hard-earned fear of expensive software. He is running a business, not a hacker consultancy, and his clients count on him running it in a timely manner. The Joneses are not looking forward to three more nights of take-out pizza eaten on top of the Sub-Zero packing box in their 90% remodeled kitchen simply because Jeff can't open a document.
I gave Jeff the best, simplest, and most technically correct answer I could: download OpenOffice and use it to open those archaic (1998) Microsoft Word documents, along with anything else that gets sent his way by subcontractors, lawyers and other phyla. Some guys wouldn't flinch at spending $300 or more on a new office suite -- the Joneses could use some bullnose molding and a few extra hours of installation to cover it. Not Jeff -- he is a man of value. A man of pilgrim frugality. Yankee ascetic if not Yankee fanatic, but that's an accident of geography and ancient curses.
Jeff's answer: "I gotta check this out." And then he gave me more than $300 in free advice: the name of a plumber who can (he swea-uhs) fix a faucet with an arcane retro valve that refuses to stop leaking.
I'm confident Jeff will download OpenOffice. I'm confident it will work, and he will ask me a question next week showing that he's taken OpenOffice through its paces. Jeff, it seems, is not alone. O'Reilly has been polling readers about their office suite preferences, and OpenOffice is giving Microsoft Office a run for the money. Yes, it's a limited sample size, and O'Reilly readers are somewhat preternaturally open-source inclined (note: good thing), but this is presidential election close.
This is so cool. Another convert.