----- Original Message ----- From: "Lars D. Noodén" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2005 5:16 PM Subject: Re: [Marketing] Comments on Sep 7, "U offers nearly free Office suite" article
> On Wed, 14 Sep 2005, Chad Smith wrote: > > Um, why the heck couldn't you run MS Office 97 or XP "as long as you want"? > > There is nothing forcing you to upgrade if you don't want to. > [snip] > > Well, first, the old versions don't read the new formats. That's > currently a much smaller problem than it has been in the past because very > few have bought into the recent versions of MSO compared to the past. Or > are there now patches for the old versions of MSO to read the new formats? Have been for a long while. One of my clients - with about 10,000 seats, still runs NT4 with Office 97 as their standard desktop build. The IT Director doesn't want to change to OOo at the moment, but doesn't want to change to OXP either, for the same reason - the act of changing costs a LOT of money, irrespective of whether it's from MS to MS or from MS to FLOSS. Oh, and for the record, he uses OOo at home :-) You can wager a large amount of money that when he DOES start haggling with MS about the cost of the licencing portion of the upgrade, then the alternative of moving to OOo will be raised with them as a negotiating point... and the final decision will be based around the total cost of ownership between OOo, and MSO at "I might swap to OOo - pricing". Personally, I think a lot of MS software is VERY good indeed. Whatever else they maybe accused of, no-one ever seriously claimed that MS didn't make lots of innovations readily available to a mass market in a relatively consistent way. I still find the combination of Ubuntu / OOo2 / Evolution a pain in that the use of Copy/Paste buffer between applications is wildly inconsistent. M. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
