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IBM Policy Switches From MS Office To OO.o
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."
Obviously because they said so, and no one cares.
This is just another in a very long line of people wanting something for nothing. Software isn't better just because it's free -- especially in business, where value is in the return on investment, not the initial cost. The point of open software is to use the code, not the program. Very few users dive into OOo code, nor care to even consider doing so.
This will be yet another short-term effect, whereby large groups of people try to use something that isn't microsoft, only to discover that decades of effort and billions of dollars later, microsoft has developed a program better than most -- and certainly better than OOo, but about five years. It's a small better, but it's a better better.