How to Run a Microsoft-Free Shop

STEP 12 Having had a spiritualawakening, we vowed to carry this message to other IT shopsand practice Microsoft-free computing in all ouraffairs.

Tiemaan arguably is in a position of power on this, but when hereceives a document in a "proprietary data format" - that is, .doc,.ppt and so forth - he sends a courteous reply to the person asking herto resend the document in a nonproprietary format. Most of the time,this is a painless exchange, he says. "To run a Microsoft-free shop,you simply must be disciplined about it," Tiemaan says. "When I camehere, I ditched my Windows system, and I haven't looked back."