[Porsche-O-Phile]

OpenOffice is every bit as good as MS Office - and 100% compatible. And free.

Tell me again why I should go out and spend $600 on the latest oh-so-necessary Office upgrade? Besides the cool box and all...

WRT "cloud" computing - Bill Gates was talking about "dumb boxes" 20 years ago, which is exactly where things have gone - software & data residing on wireless over-the-air networks and PCs with minimal hard drives and processing power to run them since the requirement for stuff actually on those PCs is eliminated or significantly reduced.

Of course the real reason behind this is that whomever controls the cloud, controls everyone connected TO the cloud (and dependent on the cloud...)

I like my software & data local, thanks. I control it, I own it 100%. I can even to choose to share it wirelessly via my own WiFi network, FTP server or Google Docs or Yahoo (for e-mail stuff).

But I still keep all my important stuff on my own hard drive, not on someone else's server.