We both loved Powerpoint so I broke up with Windows

My I.T. department recently announced we'd migrate to Windows 7.  At first I thought this was a  break point in my work computing life, but upon reflection me & MicroSoft have been drifting apart for some time.  MicroSoft stuff is great for casual or even high end business world "power users."  Powerpoint is an excellent application, for example.  Arguably it's the best thing MicroSoft offers, but it was a love triangle with Powerpoint that triggered my breakup with MicroSoft.

My management requires Powerpoint slides for change review & sign-off.  As a result the engineers were using Powerpoint for everything - including a lot of stuff management didn't want to see.  Powerpoint is excellent at creating high level summaries for management.  It's an ok tool for say, a user guide.  It is completely miserable for detailed engineering reports.  

Everything was showing up in Powerpoint.  We'd open our fairly competent data viewer app to create screen caps for Powerpoint slides.  We'd screen cap out of our excellent code compare app into Powerpoint slides.  Somehow the required management summary had turned into a default file format spec of .PPT!  Then, as a bonus - we'd complain about how lousy Powerpoint was as a technical writing tool... o wait... I'm still complaining...

The concept of tool diversity was my tipping point.  My monogamous relationship with MicroSoft had bothered me, but not enough.  Watching I.T. write checks while friends lost their jobs was a concern, but wasn't enough.  The tipping point was the realization that a single good multi-tool can't beat a variety of really excellent tools.

So, while real power users may scoff at my non-L33T sKillZ, here's some highlights of my breakup

• Access!  How you tease!  As my data built up over years, data corruption became intolerable.  SQL looked like a good option, and in hindsight I can say everything else is a waste of time. 
• the WinXP interpreter suite is... well... missing.  Where are sed, perl, python, Octave, GnuPlot, etc?  I'm an engineer, I do calculations and manipulate data.  Excel?  Sure... but... seriously? 
• if Octave or perl aren't enough then typically I need a C compiler... bcc, Visual studio? ... or Cygwin & gcc.  Helloooo, POSIX compliance! 
• My files have to survive laptop upgrades.  The painful jump to Office'07 left me thinking my best option for document life included open file specs and as much plain text as I can get.

In hindsight that last point seems like a "duh!" moment.  I suspect my company should agree, and if the corporate entity could converse I'd love to banter with it:

Me:  "Hey Corporation, how ya' doin?  I have a question: you use process spec as a means of independence from individual talent, that much I understand.  But your process documents have a proprietary format, which is owned by a vendor with a demonstrated interest in periodically invalidating their own formats.  Shouldn't we enforce a stable, specified process document format?"

Corporation:  "Back to work, Slave!"

 - nzvyyx