On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 19:03 -0400, Tom Taylor wrote: > May I ask, what are the numbers for your typical client (10,000+ > staff) > for an MS Office license; even with discounts?
I'm not allowed to give out those figures :-( However, I had lunch with the IT Director of one of the UK's top 20 companies a couple of months ago - he uses OOo at home - the reason he's not migrating to OOo at work is entirely due to the fact that he's not changing Office versions at all. The comments about "difficulty of migration" extend as much to migrating to newer versions of MSO as they do to OOo. It's the same set of economics that mean that my clients are typically still on MSO2000, and unlikely to change for another couple of years. When they do change, MS Office 12 is looking, well, radically different, and it may well be that OOo is seen as the LESS difficult migration at that point. In terms of "constant patching", this is actually a relatively minor issue for large companies, since once you get over a certain size, then everything to do with your desktop build is typically automated, and once that automation is in place, it's actually less work to roll out a new patch to 10,000 users (because you do it in one place on a server) than 10 users (because you end up doing each by hand.) As for viruses, the normal distribution vector is email - once you have a defence-in-depth anti-virus system with 2 or 3 tiers, each of which auto-updates hourly, then, again, it does need much ongoing effort to support, and it's hard to argue that changing office suite would mean you needed less boundary security. (Typically, my clients have an SMTP relay which does virus checking, then a different virus checker on the Exchange server, then a third virus checker on the desktop, each running autoupdates.) I see that the SME market has a much larger benefit from moving to OOo, since they don't typically already have all this centralised stuff in place, and the marginal costs per seat of all the things you identify are much higher... certainly, my own company (3 staff) has run on OOo for a couple of years, and the interoperability with Word and Excel has not been a problem except for Macros. (Powerpoint text layouts have caused a problem - I do quite a lot of public speaking these days, and have learnt the hard way that I have to preview in Powerpoint particularly since the kind of places I speak typically have one PC with all the presentations preloaded, rather than being able to use my own laptop.) Regards, Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
