Technology Alternatives for Your Business

In today's competitive business world, it is important for businesses to gain any advantages that they can over their competitors. One way that a business can gain this advantage is through the use of technology to simplify the way they do business. Business' must carefully way all of their technological options and choose the option that best suits their needs. This paper will focus on three possible technology alternatives that a business should consider.

Open Source Software

Open source software is a term used for any software that can be used free of charge. In the past, the software has usually been hard to use and much less robust than its paid for counterparts. This is no longer the case, as there are several open source software packages on the market that have joined the ranks of their paid cousins.

The biggest benefit of software is the price. Most of the software can be purchased very cheaply (the cost of the disks and handling charges) or can be downloaded from the Internet. A second price benefit is in the service plan. Service plans can be purchased for when support is needed for the software. If the users are fairly computer literate, these service plans can be eliminated and the users can research their problems on the Internet.

While there are cost benefits to using open source software, there can also be some negative items when using open source. A lot of open source software is not completely compatible with its commercial counterparts. This lack of compatibility can cause problems when trying to share documents with people outside of your company. This problem can be mitigated somewhat by carefully choosing the options of commercial software that are used and by saving documents back to plain text when necessary.