On 10/17/05, Tom Taylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: It is quite unbelievable that acquiring OOo would not bring down the TCO > significantly. The acquisition cost; the cost of an alarming number of > outages due to MS Office insecurities, bugs, and viruses; the upgrade > costs; the deployment costs, the sheer "weight" of MS Office suite in > terms of computing resources required just to start it up, etc. speak to > an enormous cost to any user base. By the way, the items that you chose > as a negative for OOo adoption are precisely those things which make it > a barrier to change for any user/buyer of MS Office; they count on it.
Let me explain how keeping an existing, (and paid for) version of Microsoft Office (or any for-pay office suite) would indeed cost less than downloading and/or installing OpenOffice.org. 1) The existing infrastructure is already in place. There is no download time. There is no deployment time. There is no time used *at all*. The computers/servers that need MS Office already have it. There is no need to use (read: *waste* or *spend*) any time installing anything. It's all there. - Conversely, downloading/installing OOo to X,000 machines is quite costly in manhours - both of wasted manhours for the employees who can't use their Office suite, and in paying the IT guy(s)/gal(s) to install it. 2) The existing training has already taken place. You may think that OOo is close enough to MSO x that no learning is required - but you are not the typical office worker. Some people work by wrote memory. My boss all but cussed me out one time because I *UPDATED HIS ITUNES*. It changed *THE COLOR* of the Itunes background, and it added a button to the side. Nothing was removed but the links to songs he no longer had on his machine (things he removed, not the update - but I deleted the broken links). He *FREAKED OUT*. Again, only 3 things changed, the color of the background, 1 added button, and removed broken links. Tell me again how much OpenOffice.org is "just like" Microsoft Office 2003 or XP or 97 or anything. Another example - my friend was teaching her older, more experienced co-worker (same department, similiar job responsiblities) how to do the reports that she normally does while my friend is going away for her honeymoon. The more experienced coworker did not know how to use the scroll-wheel! Let me explain, my friend is an accountant. They use Excel about 35 hours a week in her office. Her co-worker never used a shortcut, never Right-Clicked, never typed in a formula function, never scrolled with the mouse. She did everything *EVERYTHING* with the drop-down menus from the menu bar. She'd been working in Excel for over a decade. All she knew was the drop-downs. She didn't even Ctrl-C to copy or Ctrl-V to paste. She put her cursor in the cell - moved the mouse up to the Edit menu, clicked on it, moved the mouse down to the "Paste" option, and clicked on it. My point is, that's *all* she knew how to do. If it wasn't where it "should be" - she was lost. My friend tried to enlighten her to the other buttons on her mouse, and the quick keyboard shortcuts... her co-worker said "I think I've learned enough for one day!" These are the people - the truly smart, intelligent, hard-working people - that it takes to run a business. They do their jobs. THey do them well. They don't want to relearn *anything* on the computer. Again, I'm not talking about choosing between upgrading to Vista as opposed to switching to OOo - I'm talking about *KEEPING* MSO X as opposed to *SWITCHING* to OOo. 3) Macros, Macros, Macros. Macros are a useful tool - or so I have been taught. They take a series of potentially complex, or repetitive actions and make them automated into one simple keyboard shortcut or mouse-click. Lots of companies use them for many different purposes and reasons. If a company has them in FOO Office X, they won't work in OpenOffice.org Anything. There will be time (which = $) spent (read: wasted) rewriting all the macros the company needs. If a company switches, and doesn't actually take the time to teach their employees how to use the new system, they will still end up paying their employees to learn it, because they will be hunting around to find the danged Word Count for 30 minutes, instead of being taught it's buried under properties in the file menu. So that cost will still be there, whether it shows up on a budget or not. It's called loss of productivity. For these 3 reasons, (and plenty more that others could share), *KEEPING* whatever you have is cheaper than switching to whatever is out there, even if it's free. And most of the arguement applies to MSO versus OOo - Mac OS X 10.2 versus Mac OS X 10.4 - Windows versus Linux - Sound Edit 16 versus Audacity... Whatever. The Macros thing could be replaced by whatever neat thing the old system does that the new one doesn't, or does in a way that can't be quickly imported. Another reason is file compatiblity. The files I make with BlankOffice 10 will always work with BlankOffice 10. They might not with BlankOFfice 9 or BlankOffice 11 - and there's even less of a chance that they will with AnotherOffice 2 - but they certainly will with BlankOffice 10. OpenOffice.org is even dumb enough (dumb from a marketing standpoint) - to freaking advertise this scary fact everytime someone tries to save as a Microsoft Office format. If I switch from anything to anything, there's a chance my legacy files won't work in the new system. And again, the same arguement can be raised from Microsoft Office 11 to Microsoft Office 12 (or 10 to 11, or 9 to 10). My ultimate point is, there are plenty of reasons that switching to OpenOffice.org can cost a company *PLENTY* of money. So can upgrading to the next version of MS Office - but keeping what we got ain't gonna cost us a dime. Being a prisoner is one thing. Making you pay usurious sums for your > chains is quite another. Keeping Microsoft Office 97 doesn't cost a thing - assuming you've already paid for it. -Chad Smith
