On Sun, 14 Aug 2005, Charles-H.Schulz wrote:
certainly yes. But I'm reading the official reasons the Scottish police
had to migrate back to MS and I have some trouble seeing only "fake
reasons" to it. It seems that somebody didn't do his/her job at catering
the Scottish Police StarOffice users in their daily use and (even more
important) the overall change management of the office suite
infrastructure.
I don't see *only* fake reasons, but I am saying that they are going to be
there in a big way. Any slips are likely to go poorly, since MS execs
have mandated that staff not lose ANY customers to open source.
Related to that is the fact that MS seems to be on the back foot right
now. SO and OOo can really gain further ground at this point, if things
can be handled better.
Not only is MS having to fight OOo and SO, since it's already trying to
push MS-Office, it will also be fighting its older versions of MSO.
There has been very little uptake of MSO2003, around 15 %, which is far
lower than what they've needed in the past to leverage market share of the
new format into sales.
With so little uptake, that's got to be hurting their bottom line in a big
way: MS-Windows and MS-Office are its only cash cows, the rest loses money
and the whole juggernaut depends on those two to keep alive. MS-Office is
the most fragile, because less than 68% of sales come from OEMs, the
remainder is presumably people being forced along by file format
incompatibilities, once the new versions gain enough market share -- which
is not happening. That's compounding the desperation. So it is important
to find some way to keep OOo / SO in the news (in a positive way).
-Lars
Lars Nooden ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Software patents harm all Net-based business, write your MEP:
http://wwwdb.europarl.eu.int/ep6/owa/p_meps2.repartition?ilg=EN
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