From: Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org> Sent: Oct 27, 2005 3:22 AM To: "Shawn K. Quinn" <skquinn@speakeasy.net>, cypherpunks@jfet.org Subject: Re: [PracticalSecurity] Anonymity - great technology but hardly used

...

It's never about merit, and not even money, but about predeployed base and interoperability. In today's world, you minimize the surprise on the opposite party's end if you stick with Redmondware. (Businessfolk hate surprises, especially complicated, technical, boring surprises).

Not only that, but this is often sensible. Have you noticed the bizarre misfit between our allegedly phonetic alphabet and how things are spelled? Why don't we get everyone to change that? Or the silly insistence of sticking with a base 60 time standard? Or the whole atrocity of English measurements that the US still is stuck with? Oh yeah, because there's an enormous installed base, and people are able to do their jobs with them, bad though these tools are. ...

OpenOffice & Co usually supports a subset of Word and Excel formats. If you want to randomly annoy your coworkers, use OpenOffice to process the documents in MS Office formats before passing them on, without telling what you're doing. Much hilarity will ensue.

I'll note that you can do the same thing by simply using slightly different versions of Word. MS takes a bad rap for a lot of their software (Excel and Powerpoint are pretty nice, for example), but Word is a disaster.

Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>

--John Kelsey