Microsoft’s competitors don’t make a dent, precisely because they are free.

If you use a computer (and if you're reading this, let's assume you do), chances are that at one time or another you've used Microsoft Office. And at some point or other, if you've used it enough, you will have found some aspect of it maddening. Maybe it's when you've tried to insert a picture into a Microsoft Word document or (much worse) when you've wondered if there's any easy way to easily move through the chapters of your novel or thesis or ginormous report. If you have gotten really, really frustrated, you've tried to find a good alternative. But that's where you stopped, because the answer is: There isn’t one.

You already know a big part of the reason why: Microsoft’s (MSFT) success at pushing out the competition. As each of Office's competitors fell, Office became ever more ubiquitous and Microsoft's lead more secure. But that's not the whole story. Microsoft’s daunting dominance is certainly enough in itself to scare off would-be competitors. But there's another, less obvious reason why no one in years has made a serious stab at a software package that would take on Office. It's that the lackluster competition Microsoft does have is free.

Anybody who is moderately tech-savvy knows that, for just about anything that you might want to do on your computer now, there is likely to be a program that will let you accomplish it without paying money to Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter. The best known and most successful free software package is the Web browser Firefox, published by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. For e-mail, there's Thunderbird, Mozilla's e-mail program. For photo editing, you can download a powerful package called GIMP. And if you want to escape the clutches of Microsoft Word and Excel, there are Zoho and OpenOffice.org (yes, the .org is part of the formal name).

All these programs, like most (though not all) free software, are "open-sourced," meaning the code is available to any programmer who wants to modify it and create a new version—though major open-source software packages are regularly maintained, updated, and improved by dozens of programmers who have often worked on them for years. The open-source movement goes back to the mid-1980s, when a programmer and technology theorist named Richard Stallman started agitating for programmers to share their code. Stallman argued that the proprietary model of "closed-source" code led to programmers spending most of their time solving problems that someone else had already dealt with. Freely shared code, said Stallman, would make software development vastly more efficient.

Moreover, Stallman argued convincingly that programmers who contributed code to a shared project would reap the benefits of being evaluated by their peers based on what they did to push technology forward, instead of solely by their bosses based on the number of lines of code they managed to churn out. Stallman's own efforts to build an open-source operating system didn't get very far, but his ideas found a receptive audience among programmers.

The efforts of the programmers—many motivated mainly by a desire to make great software and be recognized for it—have yielded some amazing results. Some open-source programs are unequivocally class leading; if you are still using Microsoft's Internet Explorer, now would be a good time to download Firefox. There is a lot of other free open-source software that is less well-known but still terrific, such as the sound editing program Audacity. But just as there is plenty of mediocre commercial software, there is plenty of so-so open-source software as well.