Mark,
You make some excellent points and have provided good food for thought
and I appreciate your insights. You are correct: I don't know of a
single stockholder's lawsuit based on my premise...but time is on my
side. I believe that stockholder's will get more litigious as time goes
on because their stock values drop while C-level executives get large
bonuses and perks. That kind of situation spawns hunting for reasons as
to why it has happened. Fiscal mismanagement of assets in any form is
subject to inspection and investigation these days. I contend that
paying a large sum of money for a tool that may be gotten for an
extraordinarily lower sum is such a case of mismanagement.
May I ask, what are the numbers for your typical client (10,000+ staff)
for an MS Office license; even with discounts? What choice does your
customer/client have but to continue down this path, whether it be a 2
year or 5 year acquisition or upgrade cycle? Can you envision where
that sum of money could be better utilized by an IT department or the
company/organization at large?
It is quite unbelievable that acquiring OOo would not bring down the TCO
significantly. The acquisition cost; the cost of an alarming number of
outages due to MS Office insecurities, bugs, and viruses; the upgrade
costs; the deployment costs, the sheer "weight" of MS Office suite in
terms of computing resources required just to start it up, etc. speak to
an enormous cost to any user base. By the way, the items that you chose
as a negative for OOo adoption are precisely those things which make it
a barrier to change for any user/buyer of MS Office; they count on it.
"Not because OOo isn't adequate (it is), but because the costs of
migrating to a radically different platform, identifying all the
user written macro code, and porting it, retraining end users and IT
staff, unpicking client/server integration, and the like could,
maybe, outweigh the licence savings."
Being a prisoner is one thing. Making you pay usurious sums for your
chains is quite another.
This is an interesting and engaging discussion and I thank you for it.
It will be interesting to see which of us is correct about the different
aspects of this situation as time passes.
Tom
Mark Harrison (Groups) wrote:
On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 19:38 -0400, Tom Taylor wrote:
All that is needed is to have a single
shareholder ask the CEO how much money they paid to MS in any given
fiscal year at the next stockholders meeting. This would be quickly
followed by a shareholder's lawsuit for fiscal irresponsibility.
I'm sorry, Tom, but I deeply, deeply disagree with what you've written.
Are you aware of a single shareholder's lawsuit that has succeeded on
this basis?
I, like many here, am an IT consultant. Unlike many here, my client base
is almost exclusively large (10,000+ staff) companies.
There are two completely different answers to your question:
1: At the stockholders meeting you propose, all the IT Director would
need to do would be to answer the question, then explain that about 20%
of the Total Cost of Ownership of desktop IT services is in the software
licencing costs, and that, in today's market, it is not AT ALL clear
that the TCO would come down moving 10,000 seats to OOo.
Not because OOo isn't adequate (it is), but because the costs of
migrating to a radically different platform, identifying all the
user-written macro code, and porting it, retraining end users and IT
staff, unpicking client/server integration, and the like could, maybe,
outweigh the licence savings.
2: At the stockholders meeting you propose, all the IT Director would
need to do would be to say "nothing", and explain that most companies
(in Europe at least) upgrade software about every 5 years, and that the
copies of Office 2000 currently deployed can be used for another 2 years
at a migration of cost precisely zero.
Mark
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