So what will they do to support linux, switch all their desktops to linux and say it out load, "these articles where written with open office" , use linux servers, etc.
I'm writing a 400 page thesis on Open office, started a year ago, and I'm finishing the final revision tomorrow. I personally switched because of the superiority of OO's drawing module and its intergration with the writer program. I use a lot of diagrams and such in the thesis and MSword was just not up to it. Having a double boot PC, linux mandrake and windows, I switched to SO6 beta and then to OO and haven't looked back since. Being in an academic milieu I'm always sending papers left and right to people and editors who use word, and I haven't had any problems with that either. Finally the capacity to generate directly from OO pdf versions is a really important plus for me. I recommend OO to anyone who has serious writing to do. Personally my desktop linux is far superior to my win'98 + Office2000 desktop...
I've switched to Open office.org (OO) a year ago and wouldn't go back to MS Office if they paid me. I'm writing a thesis with it and haven't experience the glitches that made me switch in the first place. I actually consider OO superior to MSoffice, except on the speed issue. I think you can get ordinary desktop users to switch to linux, if I can do it alone (with absolutely no knowledge of programming I installed Mandrake) then users accompanied by an inhouse resource person shouldn't have any major problems. I'd say the most important part for office apps will be initial document conversions and afterwards with MS documents from other organisations. You must absolutely control this, because scrappy conversions from office docs to openoffice docs simply discourage desktop non tech users like me. The learning curve from MSoffice to OpenOffice isn't that bad, OO is pretty intuitive and has some features that MS doesn't and that now I can't do without. For the rest as others have said, evolution for email, mozilla for browsing, xmms for music etc, they are tons of desktop apps. Costumize/personalize to the max each users desktop, that could even act as an enticement to get them to switch. And don't let them install anything, keep them away from administrative tasks.
Monopoly is not a state of affairs, it is a way of doing business, so monopoly is not 100% market share, which could happen by accident if you are the only one willing to make a product, it is a way of organizing economic relationships which explicitly aims to exlude competition per se in a market. Problem then becomes what is a "market", is there a market for browsers, or is there only a market for OS's with browsers... Bottom line M$ has a vision of what an OS is which implies the disappearence of most of the desktop app "markets" by rendering them incompatible with the OS platform, or including them as bundles of windows or office, that's monopolistic.
Sociology 101, survey results are tricky. I'm not a CS, but a PhD economics/sociology student. Survey 101, when you as somebody if he/she is doing something you have to build your survey in a such a way as to single out what that person is doing and how he understands the context of his actions. In this survey the danger is the answers you are getting are data on selfperception and selfjustification not on action. A better avenue is to directly question perception of context and self vs claimed practices, and then cross the two and eliminate selfexcluding results ie what do you think of non corporate piracy vs do you buy your software. You can weigh all this using a scales of 1 to 5, etc. Then you work around the honesty problem and also get a good reading of the context. There is also the sampling problem, the two cohorts do not seem to be comparable and are very exclusive, one school or two schools. Conclusion: surveys results are tricky not because of what they say but be because of what they don't say. In this case I doubt that the claims made by the people who made the survey are fully backed up by their results. Modesty is always the best policy when it comes to "soft" science...
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So what will they do to support linux, switch all their desktops to linux and say it out load, "these articles where written with open office" , use linux servers, etc.
I'm writing a 400 page thesis on Open office, started a year ago, and I'm finishing the final revision tomorrow. I personally switched because of the superiority of OO's drawing module and its intergration with the writer program. I use a lot of diagrams and such in the thesis and MSword was just not up to it. Having a double boot PC, linux mandrake and windows, I switched to SO6 beta and then to OO and haven't looked back since. Being in an academic milieu I'm always sending papers left and right to people and editors who use word, and I haven't had any problems with that either. Finally the capacity to generate directly from OO pdf versions is a really important plus for me. I recommend OO to anyone who has serious writing to do. Personally my desktop linux is far superior to my win'98 + Office2000 desktop...
I've switched to Open office.org (OO) a year ago and wouldn't go back to MS Office if they paid me. I'm writing a thesis with it and haven't experience the glitches that made me switch in the first place. I actually consider OO superior to MSoffice, except on the speed issue.
I think you can get ordinary desktop users to switch to linux, if I can do it alone (with absolutely no knowledge of programming I installed Mandrake) then users accompanied by an inhouse resource person shouldn't have any major problems.
I'd say the most important part for office apps will be initial document conversions and afterwards with MS documents from other organisations. You must absolutely control this, because scrappy conversions from office docs to openoffice docs simply discourage desktop non tech users like me. The learning curve from MSoffice to OpenOffice isn't that bad, OO is pretty intuitive and has some features that MS doesn't and that now I can't do without. For the rest as others have said, evolution for email, mozilla for browsing, xmms for music etc, they are tons of desktop apps. Costumize/personalize to the max each users desktop, that could even act as an enticement to get them to switch. And don't let them install anything, keep them away from administrative tasks.
Monopoly is not a state of affairs, it is a way of doing business, so monopoly is not 100% market share, which could happen by accident if you are the only one willing to make a product, it is a way of organizing economic relationships which explicitly aims to exlude competition per se in a market. Problem then becomes what is a "market", is there a market for browsers, or is there only a market for OS's with browsers... Bottom line M$ has a vision of what an OS is which implies the disappearence of most of the desktop app "markets" by rendering them incompatible with the OS platform, or including them as bundles of windows or office, that's monopolistic.
Sociology 101, survey results are tricky.
I'm not a CS, but a PhD economics/sociology student. Survey 101, when you as somebody if he/she is doing something you have to build your survey in a such a way as to single out what that person is doing and how he understands the context of his actions. In this survey the danger is the answers you are getting are data on selfperception and selfjustification not on action. A better avenue is to directly question perception of context and self vs claimed practices, and then cross the two and eliminate selfexcluding results ie what do you think of non corporate piracy vs do you buy your software. You can weigh all this using a scales of 1 to 5, etc. Then you work around the honesty problem and also get a good reading of the context. There is also the sampling problem, the two cohorts do not seem to be comparable and are very exclusive, one school or two schools.
Conclusion: surveys results are tricky not because of what they say but be because of what they don't say. In this case I doubt that the claims made by the people who made the survey are fully backed up by their results. Modesty is always the best policy when it comes to "soft" science...