Mark,
My question as to a typical large customer's costs was rhetorical. I
don't expect an answer. Also, do you carry your presentations on a
flash memory stick? I've found that useful.
What I'm finding in some of the replies to my initial post are arguments
that take both sides of the issue: a) it is too hard and expensive to
change to OOo, users need all the capabilities of MSO, b) it is easy to
upgrade desktops by cascading from servers, users don't use all of the
MSO capabilities. I believe that all of these things are true.
At the end of it all people want what they have and are adverse to
change. It's why we are using the keyboard layout that we have almost
universally. It was designed to slow down typists using manual
typewriters so they didn't mash the metal key blades. The fact that "it
has always been done this way" is not a reason, it is an excuse.
Still, I'm glad that there is an alternative to all things Closed. OO
will, hopefully, prosper and grow. The Google deal should help if it
comes to fruition.
Again, thanks to all for the discourse. I think this is a bit of
"religious" preference and won't be sorted out in this forum.
Best Regards,
Tom
Mark Harrison (Groups) wrote:
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
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