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NZ Outfit Dumps Open Office For MS Office
(Score.5, Interestin writes "The NZ Automobile Association has just announced that it is dropping Open Office and switching back to MS Office. According to their CIO, 'Microsoft Office is not any cheaper, but it was almost impossible to work out what open-source was actually costing because of issues such as incompatibility and training.' In addition, 'you have no idea where open-source products are going, whereas vendors like Microsoft provide a roadmap for the future.'" About 500 seats are involved. MS conceded to letting Office users run the software at home as well.
Now before we all agree that they suck and start the conspiracy of how much MS paid them to switch back... Perhaps they have some valid points here. What can the Linux movement do to curb the switchbacks, and address some of these concerns?
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
it was almost impossible to work out what open-source was actually costing
Sounds like there's a disconnect between the IT staff and the business side of the house. Any CIO worth their salt would have had before-and-after metrics to compare.
Expensive upgrades shoved down your throat by forced upgrades due to designed incompatibilities with previous versions? Why can't newer versions of office access all the older versions?
"In addition, you have no idea where open-source products are going, whereas vendors like Microsoft provide a roadmap for the future."
Why do I think the exact opposite? I have more faith in ODF being supported by multiple apps, say, twenty years from now.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Why? Because someone couldn't make open source work for them? I think they provided a fair assessment of some of the major obstacles to open source. The school district I work for is clamoring for a switch to MSO from Star Office 8. Why? Because we can't find people to train employees in SO8, which means our training funds from the state are wasted and because we are completely unsupported.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
...doesn't mean it's cheaper. I am kind of a open-source fanboy myself, but when it came time to either buy Photoshop or spend valuable hours learning to use Gimp, I also opted for the cash-heavy/time-light option.
My employer pays something like $40/hr (I think..I'm salary). So if I spent even 10 hours getting as good with Gimp as I already am with Photoshop, then the closed-source product is cheaper. But I do use all open source at home when time is less important than money.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Yea, those word processors and spreadsheet programs need a good roadmap. Think of how much they have changed since Office 97.
Why? Because someone couldn't make open source work for them?
No, because TFA specifically said that MS "conceded" to letting their users run office at home.
I'm not saying the points for switching back to MSO aren't potentially valid but this story reminds me of a lot of recent trends. Companies/governments only have to mention the word "Linux" or "Open Source" around MS these days and suddenly they are falling over backward to give a better deal, concede on a license issue and in general make people feel like their getting a better deal then the rest of the world. It's a great new procurement strategy:
1. "Evaluate" open source for next upgrade cycle
2. Negotiate with MS for lower license fees
3. Cite training/hidden costs as reason for giving up on Open Source
Again, not saying that some reasons for sticking with MS aren't valid but some of this is just plain gaming the system.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Excel, Access, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Publisher are all just word processors? What about all the back-end collaboration tools?
If you think MSO and OO.o are "just word processors", just stick with Wordpad. It came with Windows.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
After actually reading the article, the reasons they switched to MS Office are:
*They weren't sure if it was cheaper or not, so they bought MS Office (again), which guarantees that OOo was cheaper.
*MS told them some stories about future plans that MS may or may not do with MS Office, and OOo didn't.
*Someone wanted to use Word and Sharepoint as a CMS for their website.
*They didn't actually switch 100% to OOo, so there were occasional internal compatibility issues between OOo users and MS Office users. It would also seem that some employees were sending ODF docs to the outside world, and people didn't know what they were.
So, basically, this organization switched back to MS Office because of some formatting issues with MS' undocumented file formats, some features that aren't actually available yet in MS Office looked interesting, and improper use of OOo by employees.
I've heard a lot of reasons to use MS Office instead of OOo, but this looks to be a pretty sorry collection of excuses. So far, the only two that come up in my line of work are lack of training, and poor VBA support. There isn't really any way around the VBA problems at the moment, either.
"it's just a word processor"
So, in other words, you've never worked inside a modern corporate office.
Users use of the suite of applications that come in Microsoft Office to do complex things, from presentations, to databases, to collaboration, to complex spreadsheets, etc etc. There's a *lot* of functionality present in OO or MS Office and it's not all trivial to use.
When I bought my last car they dealer conceded to selling it for a price lower than what was shown on the sticker.
How is MS offering a discount/incentive/license concession any different? Some MS sales rep had a potential sale of 500 seats, and had to sweeten the deal to get a sale. Purchasing people are always pushing for a better deal, and threatening to take their business elsewhere if they don't get it.
...just stick with Wordpad. It came with Windows.He could... if WordPad, err, wasn't so incompatible with reading default MS Office - generated .doc files...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
OpenOffice handles its native files just fine. How well does MS Office handle OpenOffice files? The fact it works so well with Office files is an achievement, but if you're using OpenOffice then you're better off using its native format.
As for OpenOffice's compatibility with Office, it really comes into its own when Office is incapable of opening an Office file. It does happen. And in that case, OpenOffice will frequently be able to come to the rescue.
I'm sure it's much more preferable to be on the office treadmill, where you're eventually forced to upgrade by being sent files from the newer version.
I find it amusing how there is this attitude that OpenOffice sucks because it can't always perfectly handle a closed proprietary format, but how the situation that people are being locked into that format is somehow perfectly acceptable. Despite all its flaws. I can't help but stifle a laugh when I hear about the perfection of MS Office. The suite has so many problems, I truly do not know where to begin. It's merely entrenched, highly overrated and as buggy as hell.
It's easy to bang together a quick PowerPoint presentation if you want to put some slides up for a presentation you are doing to your class. It's easy to bang together a presentation if all of the data that you need is stored in a single location, or in a single spreadsheet. On the other hand if you need to draw together data from multiple business units spread across the globe that are stored on servers spread across the globe, you might want some collaboration tools. You might want something like SharePortal and Office 2007. Your board of directors might expect to see things like trend data, and market capitalization, and ROI, and all sorts of other information that people often store in Excel, or Access or SQL, or Oracle, or whatever. You might a tool like Excel that can pull data from multiple data sources and correlate it before you dump it into something like PowerPoint to display it.
You are right when you think that the individual, specific tasks in and of themselves may not be all that complex. However tying all of those tasks together in an enterprise environment is a completely different story.
> If you or anyone else can't figure out how to use Open Office without "training" they've got to be dumb
> as rocks. And I'm not writing flame-bait here. I dead serious about that.
By writing that you make it clear that you have never had to deal with 'normals'. Wish I worked where you work, but I don't live on a planet where everyone is computer literate[1], capable of independent learning and posseses above average intelligence and reasoning abilities. Thankfully we never allowed Microsoft in the front door though so we manage to get along with OO.o/FF/etc running on networked Linux workstations. We didn't have to deal with the whinging due an inability to deal with change but do training? What fantasy world are you living in. It can take sometimes take a week to get a new hire to learn that logging in with CAPS LOCK on won't work.
[1] I define 'computer literate' much the same way as I define 'literacy'. Literacy in the sense of the English Language means one able to read the language, speak it, reason in it and express thoughts in writing using it. Computer literacy means the ability to read and write PROGRAMS, even simple ones, understand the ideas underlying common applications i.e. understand what cut/paste DOES, not memorizing the keystroke. Know the IDEA behind a spreadsheet. Knowing every function isn't required, knowing enough to figure out the help system IS.
Democrat delenda est
I can explain to you why you don't understand why people feel Office is much better with regards to compatibility.
You see compatibility from a technical point of view, where OpenOffice surely does a better job opening Office documents than Office does opening OpenOffice documents.
People who use Office as a tool for business see compatibility from a social point of view. Office can open 99.99% of documents that are sent to them. Open Office can only open 90%. And that's really the end of the story.