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IBM Policy Switches From MS Office To OO.o

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the let's-see-some-school-districts-do-the-same dept.

eldavojohn writes "It's frequent that we hear of a country or city or company switching from Windows to Linux, but it's rare that we hear of one third of a million employees being told to use Lotus Symphony (IBM's OO.o variant) over MS Office, and also to use the Open Document Format when saving files. The change has been mandated to take place in the next 10 days. Of course, they are doing this to illustrate that they actually offer a full-fledged alternative to Microsoft. With i4i stirring stuff up against MS Office and absolving OO.o from litigation, are we on the verge of a potential break from Microsoft's dominant document suite? Hopefully IBM supports OO.o past Sun's acquisition by Oracle instead of concentrating on Lotus Symphony."

1 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. I can explain that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Eh, I was joking mostly. I really don't know why I got modded insightful

    Let me explain.

    Practically everyone on Slashdot is a linux loving, MS hating, pro-GPL geek with no social life.

    Now, everyone knows that the previous paragraph is not true. That stereotype applies to rather small portition of slashdotters. However, many here think that the other Slashdotters believe that stereotype to be accurate.

    As such, they easily mod anyone posting against that (anti-GPL, "MS has done good stuff too", etc.) as insightful. By doing this they believe that they are helping others see that the stereotype doesn't really apply to everyone here.

    Conversely, it is very easy to get funny mods by using that stereotype. If you claim that Slashdotters have no social life, you get modded either as troll or funny. The latter is not because mods think you actually are funny. It is because they think "Hah. That guy joked about our lack of social life though he really knows it's not that accurate. He is one of the people who get that! I'll give him a funny mod."

    Think this post is not correct? I bet you that you could post practically identical posts to each and every Linux or MS related story about how MS products are occasionally rather useful and get modded insightful every single time.

    -AC