On Monday 19 July 2010 06:00:30 Shamit Verma wrote: > We did a trial run of Open Source apps for 2 weeks with 40 users > across multiple geographies that volunteered for it. And it were > minor issues like these that made 34 of them not support it. Large > amount of feedback was "Can not do X with Calc"/. In reality > functionality X was available but not at the place where users > expected. None of the users was from IT.
I presume you never heard of "look and feel" lawsuits. > > E.g. on Calc "I could not set Time series interval on X axis to > week". Or "Individual formatting for multiple series on X axis does > not work" Excellent opportunity. write a macro for the customers that want some specific microsoftism. > It is sad, but the fact is > Exchange/SharePoint/Excel/PowerPoint/Outlook is de-facto setup for > most business with 2000 or more desktops. If migration to any tool > "makes them think", most users would appose it. More opportunity - training. > > On positive side, 27 users were happy with Writer. > > I believe for small companies (100 or fewer users) , migration > should be easier. Since they would not have Sharepoint+Exchange > baggage. Sharepoint+Exchange makes end user's tasks easier, but > makes it difficult to introduce something other then Outlook or > Office. That was the goal. And suckers that many users are, they have fallen for the trap. You can do little about it, until the user gets screwed by the usual M$isms. > > > OTOH, one large company (IBM) has decided to use open source stack > as far as possible. Lets see how it goes. > > When I started in IT, Lotus notes stack (Email/document > management/IM) was de-facto standard. Now, it is Microsoft stack. > > Hopefully in next 10 years it would be some open source stack. You need to read a lot about the poltics of software tech, to avoid coming to a naive conclusion. Bottomline is that M$ users are in a deadly trap created by M$ and the esacpe involves both cost and effort. The longer you shy away from the hard decision, the higher the cost and effort. Further if you need innovative tech, closed systems are the last place you would want to be in. -- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
