Small Business and piracy. It's not just about money!

There are many problems facing small business’s and start ups. These range from raising capital or funding, down to the more important aspect of attracting customers and making sales.

One problem that every small business has today is the cost of IT, which as most people know can be prohibitive.

Many open source advocates use the cost of software, or to be more blunt, the cost of Microsofts software (Windows, Office, etc.) to shove products such as Open Office and Linux down the throat of small business owners who are just trying to save a buck and stay afloat.

Yesterday, while dealing with a client (for the sake of disclosure, this client is a friend, and I handled the job for free), I was given a little insight into how small business owners think about IT problems, especially ones that aren’t involved with the IT industry.

Let’s call my clients firm Company X.

Company X is involved in the construction industry. Having recently purchased new premises they have begun to expand their workforce, and are also implementing a sales force so they can sell products related to their industry.

Previously, all the administration of company X was handled by the owner. The owner has confessed to being computer illiterate, only using his battered old laptop for work when absolutely necessary. The rest of the time it was just used for email or surfing the web. Due to the expansion, company X recently took delivery of 7 desktops from Dell.

Financial concerns prohibited the company from purchasing licensed copies of Microsoft office. 4 of the 3 desktops would require Office Professional, while the others could survive with just Word and Outlook. They would also require in house email as well as the ability to share calendars and a file server.

When approached by my client I immediately recommended Open Office as a solution to his Office problem. After showing him the ins and outs of Open Office, he thought to that this would be an excellent solution. So I set up a server for them (Linux based) that would be essentially fire and forget for them, set up calendaring, email and Open Office for every user.

A few days later issues started to arise. The staff had little computer experience (after all why would they?) and the experience they did have was with proprietary software. Open Office was alien to them, and this let to an increase in the amount of time ordinary task took, due to a need to “learn” how to use Open Office. Then the compatibility issues raised there ugly head. While Open Office touts itself as being “compatible with all other major office suites”, compatibility is not 100%.

This really came to a head when the client tried to open various documents which he had previously created on his laptop (in Office 2003), and they didn’t open correctly in Open Office. The formatting would be wrong, or text would have extra spaces or new lines etc..

Talking with my client about this, I assured him that these were just minor teething problems. That all the documents that were created from now on would work together, and that anything that needed to be sent off site could just be saved in the proprietary Office format. (actually I set up OO to save in the Office 2003 formats by default).

The client responded that he simply “didn’t have the time” to be editing documents that didn’t open correctly, or learning to use Open Office when he had Office 2003 on his laptop. Also, if they didn’t open correctly, how could he be sure that a document he created would show correctly when he emailed it out to someone else? Also, MS Office opens quicker. Much quicker.

After chatting about this, the client decided that he need MS Office after all, and against my advice installed pirated copies of MS Office on all of the machines. Now, I advised against this, solely because the software was pirated, not because I didn’t agree that MS Office would make things easier and more efficient, especially with regards to training of new staff.

We in the IT industry often fail to see the needs of the average user.

Open source software has a long way to come, and in general much of it still lacks the polish and familiar user interfaces of Microsoft (or Apple) products. Open Office in particular is heralded as one of the great triumphs, or a flag ship of open source software. The fact of the matter is that the average user is daunted by how incomplete it is. for example, when you download load the Danish version, it doesn’t come with a Danish spell check dictionary installed. Also the naming of components, and buttons leaves much to be desired. “Impress” does not even hint at “Power Point”.

Before I get flamed for being anti-open source, regular readers know that I am quite the opposite. I use OO as my main office suite every day, and sitting in front of my Ubuntu machine right now. But I’m a geek! I’m not an “average user”. I can take the time to create work arounds for annoyances or problems with the software I use. I like many of you reading this have been using computers for so long that it doesn’t take long to master any new interface.

But the average user is not like us.
Average users, small business and the world alike, all want and need consistency and ease of use. They need to do business, and all though it doesn’t justify piracy the need for ease of use and efficiency will drive them to use pirated software when they can’t afford it.

It’s a strange conclusion, but due to the lack of consistency and interoperability, free software pushes people and small business’s towards piracy.