Re: [discuss] Reason corporates won't touch OO.o

[Eric Hines]

If you're going to try to sell--or give away--a new product into an 
established market, with an established dominant competitor in that market, 
you have to make it _easy_ for your target customer to get into your 
product and to walk from his/her legacy (dominant competitor's) 
product--into which your customer already has a large financial commitment, 
which only makes it harder for your target customer to walk away.  And that 
includes macros that are never "distributed with the delivered 
document."  In the particular case of macros, if it's just a matter of 
"shifting from one dialect of Basic to another one in a totally open way," 
then where are the tools to do the translations?  Why should we expect our 
customers to have to completely regenerate their hard-developed 
macros--including the ones developed by particular users on their PCs--all 
over _again_?  And I'll never deliver a presentation--a slide show, 
e.g.--from a pdf.  It looks like crap.

You can wish it away with remarks about FUD, but the bottom line is it's on 
the seller to make it easy for the customer, not the other way around.  If 
you don't make it easy to get in, they won't come, even if you build it 
brilliantly.

Eric

At 05/17/05 03:47, you wrote:
The fact that OpenDocument is close to be an ISO standard is going to help 
a lot of people make the move, and help other people _force_ actors in the 
documentation exchange market to make the move.

If institutions adopt OD as their internal document format (which is 
likely to happen) then communications to and from these institutions will 
have to take place in OD files. Since tools are free and open it will be 
much easier than anything centered on closed proprietary and expensive formats.

Besides, macro compatibility is not Y2Kx10 because Y2X had to be fixed in 
the guts of closed OS/applications in a forgotten language, macro 
compatibility is about shifting from one dialect of Basic to another one 
in a totally open way. We are talking Y2K/10 here... At most.

Also, Macros are client-side applications, they don't need to be 
distributed with the delivered document in most cases. Everywhere the 
document creation process matters, OD will make it because you don't need 
OOo to make OD files, any XML compliant tool could do it. When the final 
document matters (ie display) a PDF from OD is all it takes to deliver 
something clean.

There are no reasons why corporations keen on savings on the middle to 
long term would not adopt OD in the short term. All the rest is FUD.

Jean-Christophe Helary
On 2005/05/17, at 13:29, Chris Benatar wrote:
Why do you care? The more users of an Open Source product, the more
Open Source standards are used and therefore the standards become
universal.

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