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NZ Outfit Dumps Open Office For MS Office

Posted by kdawson on from the pull-of-the-dark-side dept.

(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.

5 of 581 comments (clear)

  1. wait wait by stim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

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    1. Re:wait wait by LWATCDR · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well for one it has little to nothing to do with Linux.
      They have a few valid points but they are hard to work around.
      1. OpenOffice will never be as compatible with Office as Office is.
      2. If you know Office you must learn OpenOffice. Office is taught in every school I know of.
      3. I still don't think Calc is even as good as Excel in Office 2000 but then I haven't really used it a lot in a long time.
      4. Outlooks+Exchange are a better Enterprise calendering system than anything I have seen from FOSS.
      5. Sharepoint. I haven't seen anything as easy to use from the FOSS community.

      Microsoft had done some good things, give the devil his due.

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  2. Re:Sniff, sniff... by PFI_Optix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  3. Just becasue it's free... by Itninja · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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.

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  4. Re:Sniff, sniff... by PFI_Optix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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