You know the score. You receive a file from someone, and nothing you have on your Mac or PC can open that document. Nothing. It might as well be empty space as far as you're concerned, and therein lies the dilemma. How do you weigh a company's interests in having a proprietary format that requires the use of their app against the right of having the freedom to read any document directed to your attention without buying new software?

Now as far as the U.S. government is concerned, there's now an executive order from President Obama that is intended to make data "open and machine-readable." Without going into the fine details, it basically means that material that's intended for public release should be read by anyone who is able to access the information.

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So if you can believe some of the media chatter in recent months, the iPhone 5 was one huge failure, and therefore Apple is no longer the company to beat in the tech universe. Samsung is emerging victorious, except for the fact that, in the critical December quarter in 2012, the iPhone 5 beat the Samsung Galaxy S3 by a large margin. Mano a mano and all that.

Indeed, there are even reports that production of displays for the iPhone 5's successor, the alleged iPhone 5S, will begin next month, making way for a possible introduction at a special Apple media event anywhere from August through early September. But that would simply be in keeping with an almost annual upgrade cycle. That doesn't strike me as a rush, and didn't Tim Cook state that Apple's major new product intros wouldn't begin until the fall?

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If you can believe Microsoft, over 100 million Windows 8 licenses have been sold so far. This number is consistent with the initial uptake of Windows 7, so you have to wonder how these figures are being collected, since PC sales continue to decline. Is it possible Microsoft is just lying?

Well, probably not. But what constitutes a sale?

It's not just people downloading Windows 8 upgrades, actually. Microsoft earns most of its keep selling software licenses to OEMs, who bundle Windows with a new PC, any PC. So, yes, I suppose it's possible that Microsoft has booked 100 million sales into its ledgers. But that doesn't mean that 100 million copies of Windows 8, or anything close to that number, are in the hands of end users. It may also be true that there are tens of millions of unsold PCs in the channel. But that doesn't matter to Microsoft, since a sale is a sale even if nobody is actually using the product.

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As you know, when you buy an app, you don't actually own it. You own the license to use it for as long as you like. And that can be a pretty long time, although new computers and new operating systems may make it impossible to use. So if you have Word 5.1a, released in 1992, which some consider to be the absolute best version of Microsoft's word processor ever, don't expect to have it work on your spanking new 2012 27-inch iMac.

That old version of Word was designed to work on a Mac using the original Mac 68K processor family. When Apple moved to the Power PC in 1994, there was a 68K emulator that allowed you to continue to use your older Mac software with somewhat less efficiency. But as Macs sped up, the emulated apps ran faster too.

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