It's not really that MSO is better, but that all their workers have a lot more experience on it. Nobody likes learning a new program when their old one works just fine, imagine having to enforce 500 of your staff to learn OO. But the real thing is that people simply get so used to one thing that they are just pretty much forever biased towards it. This is why people always go "oh anime is so much better in the original Japanese" or whatever. You aren't going to convince 500 people that OO is better or even the same when they have so much built up experience on MSO. Frankly, it's totally understandable, I have a graduate degree in CS and I myself drag my feet in learning new IDEs or whatnot. There is no way I would even spend any time learning OO, I know MSO enough to get what I want, I simply do not want to spend time and effort learning OO regardless of how easy it is.
It's interesting too if you think about it. The RIAA and MPAA spend a ton of money hunting down piracy in colleges. MS spends... almost nothing. In fact their copy protections on MSO is frankly weak compared to say Vista or XP. Have you heard of students being hunted down for having pirated MSO? We all know it's totally rampant. They also give out a lot of free crap (if you attend their boring meetings in the CS dept, you can usually walk out with free software) and of course have the edu discounts. Fact is, I'm willing to bed MSO turns a big blind eye unofficially because they know that future workers will be so used to and engrained on MSO that businesses will have to use MSO, and THAT's who MS is very tough on in terms of piracy.
Also, it's not just the current workers that have to be retrained, but imagine every new employee being asked "have you used OO before?" "What's OO? Is that like Office?" Lots of you guys are probably IT or at least geeks and hence have a boner for all things open source, but be honest, if you were a company in some totally not-related-to-tech-field that had a budget for software (tax deductible after all!) but not for having your employees miss irreplacable deadlines cuz they deep down hate their office tool or have to be trained or retrained or whatever, you too would probably stick MSO. Also, using OO as leverage against MS was smart too haha.
Note - not saying MSO is better. But college students who ARE NOT TECH GEEKS LIKE MOST OF YOU will have ZERO experience with it and Linux. If OO wants to "win" it needs to become more of a factor on college campuses, especially among depts that will produce the future office workers. This generally means NOT the CS dept!! The only open office I saw at my old campus was ALL in the engineering department! The other departments (liberal arts, social sciences, etc) ALL HAD MSO! Do you think that people go into CS to work in office admin or other heavy MSO positions? Of course not. So OO is being targeted to the wrong people. Most of you guys are the wrong people. That's probably why you are all pro-OO.
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It's not really that MSO is better, but that all their workers have a lot more experience on it. Nobody likes learning a new program when their old one works just fine, imagine having to enforce 500 of your staff to learn OO. But the real thing is that people simply get so used to one thing that they are just pretty much forever biased towards it. This is why people always go "oh anime is so much better in the original Japanese" or whatever. You aren't going to convince 500 people that OO is better or even the same when they have so much built up experience on MSO. Frankly, it's totally understandable, I have a graduate degree in CS and I myself drag my feet in learning new IDEs or whatnot. There is no way I would even spend any time learning OO, I know MSO enough to get what I want, I simply do not want to spend time and effort learning OO regardless of how easy it is. It's interesting too if you think about it. The RIAA and MPAA spend a ton of money hunting down piracy in colleges. MS spends... almost nothing. In fact their copy protections on MSO is frankly weak compared to say Vista or XP. Have you heard of students being hunted down for having pirated MSO? We all know it's totally rampant. They also give out a lot of free crap (if you attend their boring meetings in the CS dept, you can usually walk out with free software) and of course have the edu discounts. Fact is, I'm willing to bed MSO turns a big blind eye unofficially because they know that future workers will be so used to and engrained on MSO that businesses will have to use MSO, and THAT's who MS is very tough on in terms of piracy. Also, it's not just the current workers that have to be retrained, but imagine every new employee being asked "have you used OO before?" "What's OO? Is that like Office?" Lots of you guys are probably IT or at least geeks and hence have a boner for all things open source, but be honest, if you were a company in some totally not-related-to-tech-field that had a budget for software (tax deductible after all!) but not for having your employees miss irreplacable deadlines cuz they deep down hate their office tool or have to be trained or retrained or whatever, you too would probably stick MSO. Also, using OO as leverage against MS was smart too haha. Note - not saying MSO is better. But college students who ARE NOT TECH GEEKS LIKE MOST OF YOU will have ZERO experience with it and Linux. If OO wants to "win" it needs to become more of a factor on college campuses, especially among depts that will produce the future office workers. This generally means NOT the CS dept!! The only open office I saw at my old campus was ALL in the engineering department! The other departments (liberal arts, social sciences, etc) ALL HAD MSO! Do you think that people go into CS to work in office admin or other heavy MSO positions? Of course not. So OO is being targeted to the wrong people. Most of you guys are the wrong people. That's probably why you are all pro-OO.