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Energy Company Refutes Windows TCO Claims

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the war-of-words-continues dept.

apt-get writes "Computerworld Australia has a gem of a case study on Country Energy with comments from an IT manager that shoot down Microsoft's 'objective' Windows TCO claims. My favourite; 'we get to see both sides and Windows is not cheaper at all'. Interestingly, in almost every area of its critical IT infrastructure, open source and commercial software work in peace together. The IT manager even says not having MS Office on Linux is a hindrance to its desktop take up."

5 of 556 comments (clear)

  1. MS Office -does- run on Linux by rchf · · Score: 5, Informative
    If you really want to run MS Office on Linux apparently CodeWeavers has polished up a version of WINE to run MS Office with great stability (http://www.codeweavers.com). There is a review here (http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT6509081484 .html).

    Useful quote from the review '...it's now so easy (and reliable) to use Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for reading doc, ppt, and xls files, that I'm beginning to fear that those programs -- which I was getting so good at doing without - - might no longer be relegated to the status of "options of last resort".'

    Breaking the MS Office to Windows OS tie-in will seriously undermine the MS monopoly.

  2. MS Office is on Linux already by erturs · · Score: 5, Informative

    Crossover Office (http://www.codeweavers.com) runs MS Office 2000 very well under Linux, and claims to run Office XP as well. I can't personally verify the latter claim, but can testify that Office 2000 works well.

    (I have no affiliation with CodeWeavers, I'm just a happy customer.)

  3. Re:honestly, I don't get it by 99bottles · · Score: 5, Informative

    I actually prefer OO for envelopes. I can't even count the number of times that I had to re-type an address when something went wrong and the MS label window had already gone away and taken the data with it. Setting up an envelope as a document makes much more sense to me.

  4. Re:mS office on Linux by wasabii · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes. It's called open basic or some such. It is somewhat VBA compatible, but not totally, and lets you do REALLY COOL things with Java. You can write Java classes (which are really easy to write), and import/call them in VBA. Much easier than writing a DLL in VB6 or .Net and registering a COM object and some such.

  5. Re:mS office on Linux by azaroth42 · · Score: 5, Informative

    OpenOffice has multiple levels at which you can extend it. There's OpenOffice Basic, which is more powerful than just simple macros, but less powerful than your examples above.

    Secondly, there's UNO bindings for C++, Java and (less well implemented) Python. From here you can do A Lot Of Stuff, including your examples, with ease. Additions like this don't require recompiling OO, they can be distributed (simple zip file) and linked with a single command (pkgchk)

    Thirdly, as it's OSS, you could just hack the source code directly, though obviously option 2 is better.

    -- Azaroth