On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats": > Hi Boaz, > The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal > will not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a > hopeless geek.
I am not sure about the time not being ripe. In the last year, I installed for two non-technical family members a copy of OpenOffice (one a full fledged Linux, but the other a compromise Windows+OpenOffice). They both faced a few hardships when people sent them Microsoft Office documents and they didn't look exactly as expected, but I was able to convince them that it was in fact the other person who is behind the times ;-) And the documents *were* readable, even if didn't look perfect. And for users, this is a saving of 500 shekels (last time I checked). I don't see how this fact can be ignored in Israel after the summer's protests. This is actually the reason why I installed OpenOffice in these two cases - it's hard to justify adding 500 shekels to the price of a computer which cost around 1000 shekels (plus a few hundred more for the legal Microsoft Windows). > A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no > longer using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these > you need either PDF or Google docs. I believe my Android can read Microsoft Office documents out of the box :( But it's true, with all these non-Microsoft devices around, Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processor document seems to be coming to an end. -- Nadav Har'El | Sunday, Feb 5 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |It's fortunate I have bad luck - without http://nadav.harel.org.il |it I would have no luck at all! _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il