Customer: Can you also help us with infrastructure and hardware problems?

IT specialist: Of course! What's it?

Customer: We need help upgrading to Vista and Office 2007.

IT specialist: Ooops...

Customer: Is there a problem?

IT specialist: Well, you currently run Windows XP and Office 2003. Honestly, that's everything you need. In fact, I would only recommend you to have a look at OpenOffice.org version 2.2 if you want to upgrade, since that supports the latest standards in document formats. So do you want me to help you migrate to that?

Customer: We cannot use OpenOffice.org or Office 2003 because we want to read and edit Office 2007 DOCX files.

IT specialist: Why? Noone in this world uses this format, except Microsoft.

Customer: Every day, we receive documents in the DOCX format from the European Commission. We also participate in a lot of groups in Brussels, and they all send out informations and forms as DOCX.

IT specialist: So tell them t convert it to the old DOC format or even the new standard ODF format. There are probably hundreds of other interest groups out there that receive these files and cannot read them, and don't want to spend thousands of Euros for buying Office 2007.

Customer: No, everyone else in Brussels uses Office 2007 already, and they will not send the documents in a different format than DOCX. We already asked them and got that answer.

IT specialist: But why did they all upgrade to Office 2007 all of a sudden?!

Customer: The Commission's administrative staff got the licenses from Microsoft - for free.

And so Microsoft gained another market share in an important sector.