Sorry for saying it, but having promoted my companies most of my life, I have learned one thing about the media....
"good news is no news, bad news sells adverts" I see your point, and I have been in there (too many times), but that is not my point...we need to make sure we do not loose the IT departments, if they feel a) they can blame open software in general and AOO/LO in particular b) they are getting cornered by us saying "use the new release" (just like the big companies) They will (with some right) use all means to resist anything but one environment and here microsoft will be the winner (remember the old saying "by anything else than IBM and get your final paycheck"). However if we change the aspect, and make a story, of the free software based on volunteers fighting the big companies who has endless marketing money, that will be a story for the press and not harm the it departments, remembering the legal fights between microsoft and EY. Of course it would be right to mention the tax money our software saves, especially in these times of crisis. I am simply afraid, that we take the most easy approach, and start to defend AOO by telling how many others like it...that would in my opinion be to fail the issue and do no good. Jan On 21 November 2012 22:47, Rob Weir <robw...@apache.org> wrote: > On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 1:54 PM, jan iversen <j...@apache.org> wrote: > > If I may say so, based on my experience, we should not go too much into > > details about versions, this is about having a heterogeneous environment, > > something that most IT departments try to avoid at all cost, and AOO just > > happened to be the excuse for making the structure slimmer. In my > opinion a > > response telling that a newer version is better, would actually catch bad > > press, whereas a response (if possible with some equal success stories) > > showing why it is not a problem to have AOO and MS-OFFICE side by side, > > would catch a positive interest. > > > > We need the thumbs up from the IT department, and that is not > accomplished > > by telling them they should have upgraded. > > > > But apart from that, I agree that we should make a coordinated response, > if > > possible with other OO derivates. > > > > Part of the problem is that this is being whipped up in the media by > the MS partner community. So the coverage is disproportionate. > > Consider: > > Leipzig, Germany has population of 530,000. On September 9th they > announced that they had moved from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice and > had installed OpenOffice on 3900 of their desktops. > > Freiburg, Germany has a population of 230,000. On November 20th they > announced that they were moving from OpenOffice.org to Microsoft > Office on their 2000 desktops. > > Google shows 337 stories for the Freiburg story. But did you see a > mention of the Leipzig story? I saw a few, but even though it was the > larger migration, I saw only brief mentions. > > -Rob > > > Jan. > > > > > > On 21 November 2012 19:35, Andrea Pescetti <pesce...@apache.org> wrote: > > > >> On 21/11/2012 Rob Weir wrote: > >> > >>> Freiburg putting the blame for the challenges of managing > >>> heterogeneous IT systems solely on an old version of OpenOffice.org is > >>> wrong and unfair, IMHO. But it is common. > >>> > >> > >> Indeed this is quite common. But, if in this case we have reasons to > >> believe that better practices or using current/future versions of Apache > >> OpenOffice would yield better results, it would be excellent to prepare > and > >> publish a coordinated response, since this news item was featured in > many > >> online technology news sites in the last few days. > >> > >> Regards, > >> Andrea. > >> >
