40 Part I • Information Technology
operating system, has good individual products (although
not always the best individual products), and has done a
better job of integrating the individual products than the
other players.
Let’s take a closer look at the market leader, Microsoft
Office. There are three primary packaged editions
of Microsoft Office 2010 as well as a new, freevariation
called Office Web Apps—which includes online versions of
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote (digital notebook).
In the home and student edition, Microsoft Office 2010
includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. The home
and business edition adds Outlook (e-mail, contacts, and
scheduling). Then the professional edition adds Access and
Publisher (desktop publishing). The suggested retail price
is $150 for the home and student edition, $280 for the
home and business edition, and $500 for the professional
edition. The office suite is an idea that is here to stay because
of the ability to move data among the various products as
needed.
WORLD WIDE WEB BROWSERS A very important type
of personal productivity software is the Web browserused
by an individual to access information on the World Wide
Web. The Web browser is the software that runs on the
user’s microcomputer, enabling the user to look around, or
“browse,” the Internet. Of course, the user’s machine must
be linked to the Internet via an Internet service provider
(ISP) or a connection to a local area network (LAN) which
is in turn connected to the Internet. The Web browser uses
a hypertext-based approach to navigate the Internet.
Hypertextis a creative way of linking objects (e.g., text,
pictures, sound clips, and video clips) to each other. For
example, when you are reading a document describing the
Grand Canyon, you might click on The View from Yavapai
Pointto display a full-screen photograph of that view, or
click on The Grand Canyon Suiteto hear a few bars from
that musical composition.
The most popular Web browser as we move into the
decade of the 2010s is—no surprise—Microsoft’s Internet
Explorer. The Netscape browser had first-mover advantage
and was the most popular browser until the latter 1990s, but
has now disappeared. There are, however, several other
browsers in use, including the open source Firefox browser
from the Mozilla Foundation (more on open source in the
“Sources of Operating Systems” section later in this chapter),
Apple Computer’s Safari browser, the Google Chrome
browser, and the Opera browser (which is more popular in
Europe; Opera Software is based in Norway). Meaningful
browser statistics are hard to come by, but one source reports
that Firefox has 46 percent of the browser market, compared
to 37 percent for Internet Explorer (W3Schools Web site,
2010a). Because of the audience of this survey, these results
likely understate Internet Explorer usage and overstate
Firefox usage; more reasonable estimates are around 70 per-
cent for Internet Explorer and 20 percent for Firefox. Many
commentators prefer Firefox to Internet Explorer; for
example, PC Magazine’s Michael Muchmore summarizes
his review of all five browsers by saying “Firefox 3.5’s speed,
customizability, and support for new standards secure its spot
as our Editors’ Choice Web browser. If you only care about
speed and not convenience, check out Google Chrome. But
for the best of both worlds, stick with Firefox: Its new private
mode, improved speed, thrifty memory use, and leading
customizability keep it on top” (Muchmore, 2009). From
the standpoint of the user, the interesting thing about the
browser battle is that all the products are free—the price is
unbeatable!
Web browsers are based on the idea of pull technol-
ogy.The browser must request a Web page before it is sent
to the desktop. Another example of pull technology is the
RSS reader^6 software (also called an aggregator) built
into today’s browsers and some e-mail programs. Such
readers reduce the time and effort needed to regularly
check Web sites for updates. Once a user has subscribed to
an RSS feed from a particular site, the RSS reader checks
for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieves
syndicated Web content such as Weblogs, podcasts, and
mainstream mass media reports.
Push technologyis also important. In push technol-
ogy, data are sent to the client (usually a PC) without the
client requesting it. E-mail is the oldest and most widely
used push technology—and certainly e-mail spam is the
most obnoxious form of push technology. It is common-
place for technology vendors (such as Microsoft) and cor-
porations to distribute software patches and new versions
of software via push technology, often on an overnight
basis. Similarly, many organizations have pushed sales
updates and product news to their sales representatives and
field service technicians around the world.OTHER PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY PRODUCTS Desktop
publishinggives the user the ability to design and print an
in-house newspaper or magazine, a sales brochure, an
annual report, and many other things. Among the more
popular desktop publishing products are Adobe InDesign,
Microsoft Office Publisher, Serif PagePlus (United
Kingdom), and QuarkXPress. Two important security
productsare Norton Internet Security (from Symantec)
and ZoneAlarm Extreme Security (from Check Point
Software, Israel). We will consider computer security in(^6) RSS refers to several standards, where the initials stand for Really
Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, or RDF Site Summary.