Sometimes companies do have valid licenses (usually purchased in bulk) but no one has any idea where they are and what the heck happened to the software keys. Not every company is blessed with IT departments or people - so from their point of view, they paid for it, and they just use whatever method they can to get it working, this is especially true on the other side of the world where calling the local Microsoft or vendor office won't get you much help. And no way they are going to call a US hot-line to get it resolved
In a local court of law, especially one where software rights are acknowledged, sometimes the actual software and license key is irrelevant as long as the paper trail holds up
As much as I dislike using MS products, the fact of the matter is OO is not ready for day to day usage. The following are true:
- It is slow
- It is at times unstable
- If a user cannot achieve their tasks in OO in less or equal time to Office, then OO has failed
Our company prefers to implement open source solutions, simply because it means the customer's budget can be allocated more towards services and customization rather than license fees.
That being said, trying to wrangle with OO when you're doing simple tasks such as drafting documents, contracts and presentations becomes a technical debugging exercise... means that this software goes out the window.
I tried to like it, but they really need to focus on getting performance and core functionality polished until it's so reliable day to day users can get their tasks done without thinking about the tool. Adding feature after feature and increasing bloat is the same direction that MS is taking the next version of Office, but at the very least, the performance and basic functions are working. The same definitely cannot be said of OO. If they want to be a MS Office alternative, they should not emulate MS's path of counting the # of features. Core functionality and reliable performance would definitely at least win this user's usage.
I run a small business and all the new machines we have came with Vista. We haven't had any problems with it at all, in fact people tend to like it a bit better. It does require some nice hardware to run, but if you do have it, it runs a whole lot better than XP. Just laptop functionality like sleep and hibernate work as they should. XP was pretty horrible for this.
We do a lot of database work, dealing with everything from DB2, Oracle to Postgres and MySQL. Older versions of the major DBMS will obviously not work on Vista, but anyone who installs Oracle on a laptop is kidding themselves. VMWare is the only way to do development in a clean environment. In addition, these DBMSs don't run on XP. Windows 2000 or 2003, and/or SUSE/Red Hat.
The basic tweaks I usually do to any Vista machine is to turn off the UAC, which is pretty stupid. It's like having a lawyer on your desktop telling you to sign everything so that MS isn't responsible for any problems.
My home office workstation has a 64-bit processor with 6GB RAM, and every day tasks do seem faster. My dislike with XP is simply that the entire GUI is based off the CPU, nothing is off-loaded to the video card. With a decent GPU, Aero out-performs XP by a significant margin just when dealing with a bunch of open Explorer windows. I can definitely open up to 50+ folders and not have a problem. XP on the other hand will most likely crash at that point.
Playing WoW also is pretty nice @ 1920x1200, dual monitor setup, running windowed. I can check DKP and strats while having a bunch of documents open. One time I actually forgot to close a VMWare environment (Win2k3, Oracle 9i) before raiding and didn't notice any slowdown. On my girlfriend's machine, running the same VMWare will completely render the GUI unusable. This is where Vista really shines.
In fact if I had to choose, I'd take Vista Business any day over XP. Vista Ultimate is a little bloated, with a lot of functionality that people don't need and only serves to slow your system.
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Sometimes companies do have valid licenses (usually purchased in bulk) but no one has any idea where they are and what the heck happened to the software keys. Not every company is blessed with IT departments or people - so from their point of view, they paid for it, and they just use whatever method they can to get it working, this is especially true on the other side of the world where calling the local Microsoft or vendor office won't get you much help. And no way they are going to call a US hot-line to get it resolved
In a local court of law, especially one where software rights are acknowledged, sometimes the actual software and license key is irrelevant as long as the paper trail holds up
- It is slow
- It is at times unstable
- If a user cannot achieve their tasks in OO in less or equal time to Office, then OO has failed
Our company prefers to implement open source solutions, simply because it means the customer's budget can be allocated more towards services and customization rather than license fees.
That being said, trying to wrangle with OO when you're doing simple tasks such as drafting documents, contracts and presentations becomes a technical debugging exercise... means that this software goes out the window.
I tried to like it, but they really need to focus on getting performance and core functionality polished until it's so reliable day to day users can get their tasks done without thinking about the tool. Adding feature after feature and increasing bloat is the same direction that MS is taking the next version of Office, but at the very least, the performance and basic functions are working. The same definitely cannot be said of OO. If they want to be a MS Office alternative, they should not emulate MS's path of counting the # of features. Core functionality and reliable performance would definitely at least win this user's usage.
We do a lot of database work, dealing with everything from DB2, Oracle to Postgres and MySQL. Older versions of the major DBMS will obviously not work on Vista, but anyone who installs Oracle on a laptop is kidding themselves. VMWare is the only way to do development in a clean environment. In addition, these DBMSs don't run on XP. Windows 2000 or 2003, and/or SUSE/Red Hat.
The basic tweaks I usually do to any Vista machine is to turn off the UAC, which is pretty stupid. It's like having a lawyer on your desktop telling you to sign everything so that MS isn't responsible for any problems.
My home office workstation has a 64-bit processor with 6GB RAM, and every day tasks do seem faster. My dislike with XP is simply that the entire GUI is based off the CPU, nothing is off-loaded to the video card. With a decent GPU, Aero out-performs XP by a significant margin just when dealing with a bunch of open Explorer windows. I can definitely open up to 50+ folders and not have a problem. XP on the other hand will most likely crash at that point.
Playing WoW also is pretty nice @ 1920x1200, dual monitor setup, running windowed. I can check DKP and strats while having a bunch of documents open. One time I actually forgot to close a VMWare environment (Win2k3, Oracle 9i) before raiding and didn't notice any slowdown. On my girlfriend's machine, running the same VMWare will completely render the GUI unusable. This is where Vista really shines.
In fact if I had to choose, I'd take Vista Business any day over XP. Vista Ultimate is a little bloated, with a lot of functionality that people don't need and only serves to slow your system.