On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 19:38 -0400, Tom Taylor wrote: > All that is needed is to have a single > shareholder ask the CEO how much money they paid to MS in any given > fiscal year at the next stockholders meeting. This would be quickly > followed by a shareholder's lawsuit for fiscal irresponsibility.
I'm sorry, Tom, but I deeply, deeply disagree with what you've written. Are you aware of a single shareholder's lawsuit that has succeeded on this basis? I, like many here, am an IT consultant. Unlike many here, my client base is almost exclusively large (10,000+ staff) companies. There are two completely different answers to your question: 1: At the stockholders meeting you propose, all the IT Director would need to do would be to answer the question, then explain that about 20% of the Total Cost of Ownership of desktop IT services is in the software licencing costs, and that, in today's market, it is not AT ALL clear that the TCO would come down moving 10,000 seats to OOo. Not because OOo isn't adequate (it is), but because the costs of migrating to a radically different platform, identifying all the user-written macro code, and porting it, retraining end users and IT staff, unpicking client/server integration, and the like could, maybe, outweigh the licence savings. 2: At the stockholders meeting you propose, all the IT Director would need to do would be to say "nothing", and explain that most companies (in Europe at least) upgrade software about every 5 years, and that the copies of Office 2000 currently deployed can be used for another 2 years at a migration of cost precisely zero. Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
