I know I posted earlier on this email, but I wanted to add something. Though I helped shoot down his arguments, they touched on good points. It may be more constructive to turn those points into questions for us all to address. I'll list a few; maybe other people can pull a few more out of it:
1) How do we show cost effectiveness of OpenOffice. That is, do we have a nice graph that says "Per 1000 stations, you save x dollars over 10 years?" 2) How do we address change anxieties? The original email pointed out that they are clearly there, not that I think anyone was under the illusion that an "If you build it, they will come" mentality would work. What is the strategy for overcoming that (even simple things like catch-phrases). 3) I've come to realize that 99% of people who are unhappy with Microsoft's Office package are IT professionals, and most businessmen have accepted that the cost of Office is just a fact of life. This generates a lot of apathy on the subject amongst the people you really need to convince, even the home user. Once he has the computer, he's paid for it, how does it help him to switch now? How do we get over this apathy? These issues may be old hat. I haven't seen anything about these points, but then, I'm new around here. If it is, feel free to say so, but if not, perhaps we should do this. From everything I've read, the other side of the coin, getting the name known and talking OpenOffice up, seems to be well in hand. -Daniel Lynn -----Original Message----- From: Mark Harrison (Groups) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2005 2:00 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Marketing] It?s hard to beat Office king 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] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
