Do you need the new version of Microsoft Office? After reading about today’s Office 2010 launch, I doubt I will upgrade. But I may need Word 2010.

Office 2010’s new feature list fails to interest me. It’s a long list of things I don’t need.

For example, I don’t need the SharePoint integration. I can’t use SQL or the Office Communications Server.

I’ve stopped using Outlook. So anything new there passes me by. Outlook doesn’t make sense for a single user when Gmail is so much easier.

I’d rather slash my wrists than inflict PowerPoint on anyone.

Much as I admire Excel, I barely use it. The Office 2007 version is more than enough. If I’m stuck, Google Spreadsheets can ride to my rescue.

Word 2010

Word is different. I use Word 2007 daily. I’m a journalist. My word processing needs are basic.

I don’t use mail merge or do anything fancy involving macros. I’ve never used cross-references, indexing, or end-notes.

For me, Word is a sledgehammer cracking a nut.

I certainly don’t need any more Word features. In fact, I’d prefer fewer.

For all its allegedly user friendly face, Word is a complex mishmash of fancy new gadgets and clunky old bits which still don’t work as expected and barely work with each other.

The extra graphic handling features in Word 2010 mean nothing to me. Word’s fussy auto-formatting makes my blood boil. The safety features are also annoying.

If I need to collaborate on documents – which happens in at least two of my regular freelance jobs – I use Google Docs. It’s a lousy word-processor, but a great way to share.

Despite all this, I still may shell out for Word, simply because it is a tool of my trade. I’m comfortable working in Word. Moving to an alternative would be a small financial investment, but a huge investment in terms of training.

I’ve found over the years it pays to stay up-to-date with Word because sooner or later I run in to compatibility problems.

Which sums things up. I don’t need Office 2010. I may need Word 2010, but not yet.

No upgrade discount

All of which makes Microsoft's decision to charge everyone full price for the software look like a dumb move. Lord knows there's little enough incentive to upgrade, but to make users pay a premium rather than offer discounted upgrade prices will make the buying decision far easier for many users.

The world's stock of data grew 62% last year.

According to The Guardian, we've squirreled away 0.8 zettabytes of data. That's 800,000 petabytes, where each petabyte is a million gigabytes. Somewhere along the way we forgot about exabytes (1000 petabytes).

By the end of this year we'll be sitting on 1.2Zb.

It's a lot of data.

But as I've previously reported, almost all the data stored around the world is worthless junk. Experts say as much as 90% of stored data is useless.

We're not talking about trash tv or bad music. We're talking about data that is of no use to anyone; useless files, duplicate data, temporary files that became permanent.

Forget everything you hear from businesses selling virtualisation as a green technology. If the so-called green computer makers really wanted to use less electricity and save the planet, they'd be working on tools to de-duplicate files and data and applications to help us cull rubbish from our hard drives.This would also make it easier to find the good stuff.

You probably use a to do list to stay organised.

Simple handwritten lists work well for many people. Others use one of the hundreds of online or off-line productivity applications.

Millions of knowledge workers swear by more complicated organisational systems such as David Allen's Getting Things Done.

Leo Babauta at Zen Habits suggests you kill your to do list.  He has a point. Babauta says lists suck up your time and drain motivation. I agree.

But I don't agree with Babauta's alternative. This has nothing to do with his use of the passionate cliché.

Babauta suggests you focus on one important thing. This doesn't work for my work as a freelance writer. It probably won't work for most knowledge workers.

My approach uses a short-term to do list. I write what I hope to do over the next few hours, maybe one whole day.

Nothing more. No long-term lists. No someday-maybe lists. No @home, @office nonsense.

If you think you'll forget things Babauta says you should make a reminder note, but don't use it as a to do list. This also makes sense to me. I put my reminders on my calendar.

I find reminders, a short-term list and a calendar are all I need to stay on top of organisation.

Eight weeks have passed since I tried to buy a copy of Quicken Home and Business 2010.

After trying, and failing, to buy the software in a shop, I visited Quicken's online store. The company said it would take 14 working days after payment to deliver its software. The Cluetrain has yet to stop at Quicken.

Before taking my business elsewhere, I emailed the company at presales@quicken.co.nz offering to drive to Quicken's office and pick up a copy.

Quicken still hasn't responded.

Meanwhile, Xero has my business.

Open source is a response to software market failure.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, PC software was dominated by one company: Microsoft.

Rivals couldn’t successfully sell alternative applications in the face of Microsoft’s monopoly power. Start-ups could get neither market traction or access to capital to grow their businesses.

By doing away with prices and distributing online, open source undermines Microsoft’s marketing and bypassed normal channels.

But developers need to eat. Free doesn’t buy much food.

Today Microsoft is no longer dominant. And thanks to Apple’s iPhone app store, which now extends to the iPad, individuals or small teams of developers can easily enter the software market.

With other companies also offering app stores, we are about see a thousand flowers bloom.

There will be app store millionaires. But more importantly there will be many developers who can now use their skills to put bread on the table.

The bazaar now challenges the cathedral.

But with developers able to make a living from their art, they will have less time and even less motivation to work on open source projects.

Some will survive on idealism, but if a developer has a bright new idea tomorrow, do you think it will see the light as a giveaway or as a $0.99 app store download?

Amstrad was one of the brightest British businesses in the 1980s. While most British electronic companies suffered setbacks Amstrad's profits grew from £1.4 million to £160 million.

Not surprisingly, its youthful founder Alan Sugar was rated among the country's greatest entrepreneurs. What made Amstrad so great and what makes Alan Sugar tick?

Unfortunately these important questions are not answered by David Thomas's The Amstrad Story.

Thomas's omissions do not make the book worthless, it has the three i's required of any lightweight business reader it is:

• interesting,
• inspiring and
• informative.

Despite its inspirational qualities, it is fundamentally flawed as a textbook for budding Sugars.

The book offers no insight into Amstrad's recipe for success. It offers no insight period. The book chronicles Sugar's business activities with a few anecdotes and some comment from Sugar and his business partners.

Part of the problem is Sugar's reluctance to open himself up to public scrutiny. The man has a well-known dislike for journalists and likes to keep his personal life to himself.

As a journalist on the Financial Times, Thomas somehow managed to bypass this obstacle and gain access to some of Sugar's thoughts and a great deal of the more favourable aspects of Amstrad's growth period.

Yet, for the most part the book reads like public relations puffery. Alan Sugar vetted it before publication. Only Thomas's insistence on recording Sugar's bad language verbatim saves it from reading like Pollyanna.

At no point did Thomas talk to Sugar's rivals – he offers no critical analysis of Sugar or Amstrad.

As a journalist working in this area through most of this period in the UK, I knew of many who had much to say about Alan Sugar that was far from complementary. Such criticism, constructive or otherwise, would hardly diminish Sugar's achievement. It would help us understand it.

In particular, the book does not tell us enough about how Sugar started.

It seems he left a warehouse one day with a van full of electronic goods and returned that night having sold the lot – I'd love to know how.

By not telling us the whole story, Thomas leaves readers with the impression there might be something shady in Sugar's early business dealings. That isn't fair on the readers and it certainly isn't fair on Sugar.

For my money the most galling feature of this book is its Cambridge-educated author's habit of painting Sugar as a Del-Boy or Arthur Daley-type character. Why Sugar's design notes are reproduced along with spelling errors is beyond me.

The same goes for verbatim quotes complete with bad grammar or foul language. It is as if the author admires Sugar's gumption and business brain but has to show him up as being an ignorant lout at heart.

This Del-Boy theme repeats elsewhere and it stinks of the very worst kind of British class prejudice. It is a reminder of why British industry is in decline. While other nations venerate people who create new wealth the British prefer to venerate those whose ancestors made it.

Perhaps in this roundabout way the author unwittingly pulls back the curtain to show what drives Sugar: a wish to succeed and prove himself the equal or better of those born to a higher position.

If making money is a way of measuring these things, Sugar proved himself.

Despite these criticisms the book has value. The stories of how Sugar planned his computers and how he eventually acquired Sir Clive's Sinclair's business are both worth reading.

Sugar's ability to cut through distractions and get straight to the point – usually money, is spellbinding. And those nuggets of Sugar's managerial wisdom that peek out from underneath are pure gold.

Gist, Plaxo and Xobni all aim to cut through the social media cloud and pull together a comprehensive digital address book.

Although each tool has its pluses, none has a magic formula making it the must-have contact manager organiser.

Gist filters your various in-boxes and delivers incoming messages in a single place. Its strong point is sorting things in a rough order of importance. It works with email, Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook. Gist doesn’t always get this right, but it’s an improvement on the usual overloaded in-box.

Gist is free at the time of writing.

Plaxo does a reasonable job of synching to contact management applications. It can also pull in some of your social networking messages.

Plaxo is free, but you need to buy the premium service to synch with Microsoft Outlook and mobile phones. My Plaxo account is full of duplicate entries – annoyingly you can only merge these if you pay for the premium version.

Xobni looks good, but it’s an Outlook add-on and doesn’t replace the contact manager. It provides better index cards and links entries so you can quickly find a contact’s colleagues.

Google’s contact management tool – part of Gmail – is second rate. It provides little information and adds no value.

Of the three tools looked at here, I recommend Gist as a way to cut through the noise. But for now, Outlook remains the smartest contact manager.

I’m not what computer marketeers call an early adopter.

Early adopters must own the latest gadgets. They run ahead of the pack. They upgrade computers and software before everyone else.

Early adopters use the latest smartphones. They buy cars with weird features. They queue up to buy iPhones, iPads, games consoles or the newest version of Microsoft Windows.

Their computers never work properly because they are awash in beta and alpha versions of software all quietly screwing things up in the background.

And some of their kit is, well, unfinished.

Computer makers depend on early adopters. They use them as guinea pigs.

Marketing types will tell you early adopters will buy a product first to steal a march over the rest of humanity. They claim they will be the first to reap the benefits of the new product.

This can be true. But at the same time, early adopters often face the trauma of getting barely finished products to work.

There’s another reason computer makers love early adopters—they pay more. Usually, new products hit the market with a price premium. Once a product matures, the bugs eliminated and competition appears, profit margins are slimmer.

Being an early adopter is fine if you enjoy playing with digital toys. If productivity isn’t as important to you as being cool. And if you have the time and money to waste making them work.

I don’t. I prefer to let others try things first. Then, let computer makers and software developers iron out the wrinkles while the product proves its worth, I’ll turn up with my cheque-book.