Macs Lose to Dell, but at an increased cost to the customer

Well, it seems that cheapest price may be the undoing of Macs at the local school, but value was not the consideration. Anytime you have cost as the deciding factor WITHOUT value, i.e. TOTAL costs being considered, as an inclusive issue your costs will go up! Once you've been "locked in" by a vendor, your costs will go up because they can charge more. It now becomes a "tax" on your use of their product or service.

As the article points out, Microsoft's Office is the defacto standard in business, but the real question is: why? I've used MS Office since it came out and it does not cease to amaze me that people will purchase expensive things "just to keep up" with the Corporate Jones. In many jobs I had I've had no reason to use 90% of the features of MS Office, but the only reason I'm forced to use it is because of corporate policy. As a Small Business owner, the ONLY reason now to use MS Office is buying one copy to verify the limited documents going out to customers, not for the day to day work that I perform. I use Open Office instead. It's just as good a MS Office and allows me to redeploy my hard earned money to better things.