Do you own your own office data?

If it is stored in proprietary formats with lossy "export" functions then no, frankly, you don't.

Want to do something about it?
Try here: http://www.odfalliance.org/

Software is like ...

Not mathematics, not linguistics (as lore from the elders would have it), but something much more prosaic that you would not like to get on your shoe.

Software is like....