OO is fantastic. It's really great, fairly easy to use, and best of all, it's free. That was my first impression.
Then I started attempting to make a document in traditional outline format. Something so easy to do in MS Word. In OO, however...
It is what my old buddy Clarky used to refer to as having a "50M-50B" problem: 50% of the problem is that it is mysterious, the other 50% of the problem is that once you figure it out, you realize it's broken.
So, while I will continue to use OO, I'm not fooling myself into thinking it is a completely viable alternative to MS Office. I'm doing it because I believe in free/open software. I suspect that within a year or so it will have perfectly implemented all the functionality of MS Office 97, at which point it will have gone as far as it needs to go. Then we can start talking about replacing MS Office on the corporate desktop. Until then, ideology will have to rule the day.
People who complain about VoIP quality don't really know what they are talking about. I have been working with a vendor for the last few months who distributes the Cisco AVVID line and quality is generally not an issue at all. Certainly not on any modern network.
The real problem with VoIP these days is the fact that the proliferation of standards (usually a great thing) has led to an insane amount of configurability in H.323, QoS, and unified messaging, and this means that support is deeply complicated by the overwhelming number of options.
So not only can VoIP deliver good quality, its main fault is the startlingly huge number of other things it can do.
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OO is fantastic. It's really great, fairly easy to use, and best of all, it's free. That was my first impression.
Then I started attempting to make a document in traditional outline format. Something so easy to do in MS Word. In OO, however...
It is what my old buddy Clarky used to refer to as having a "50M-50B" problem: 50% of the problem is that it is mysterious, the other 50% of the problem is that once you figure it out, you realize it's broken.
So, while I will continue to use OO, I'm not fooling myself into thinking it is a completely viable alternative to MS Office. I'm doing it because I believe in free/open software. I suspect that within a year or so it will have perfectly implemented all the functionality of MS Office 97, at which point it will have gone as far as it needs to go. Then we can start talking about replacing MS Office on the corporate desktop. Until then, ideology will have to rule the day.
People who complain about VoIP quality don't really know what they are talking about. I have been working with a vendor for the last few months who distributes the Cisco AVVID line and quality is generally not an issue at all. Certainly not on any modern network.
The real problem with VoIP these days is the fact that the proliferation of standards (usually a great thing) has led to an insane amount of configurability in H.323, QoS, and unified messaging, and this means that support is deeply complicated by the overwhelming number of options.
So not only can VoIP deliver good quality, its main fault is the startlingly huge number of other things it can do.
I see, so all they're talking about is an "increased potential."
Are these the same chumps at the Homeland Security Administration?