On Wed, May 18, 2005 15:39:16 PM -0500, Steve Kopischke
([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> on 05/18/05 15:07 'Chad Smith' wrote:
> >So, that's 25 hours * the average pay of the office worker * the
> >number of seats...
> >
> 25 Hours? Per user? Do you have any idea how much time that really is?
> You also seem to be assuming there would be no support materials, no
> training classes, no internal support of any kind...
>
> Not even the most technologically brain-dead user is going to lose 25
> hours of productivity when transferring to a new application
Looks like I have to retell this experience of mine every now and then
on this list. When I suggested in an internal forum at the
multinational where I work that we switch to Linux+OpenOffice to save
on licenses, I got this official answer:
a) we do *not* migrate to anything without a detailed plan (need to
maintain ISO-9000 quality certification, plus other reasons)
b) we do *not* change the basic sw tools 99% of our workforce uses
without properly training them (same reasons above)
c) such a training can only be a real, serious, formal one, that is
3/4 days full time (same reasons above)
d) the cost of the plan, instructors, material, 3/4 days of pay per
employee is *much* more than one MS Office seat, which we by the
way buy in bulk, much less than retail price. Which f***ing savings
are you babbling about?????
e) (not explicit, but coming clearly out of the whole answer) Now that
we think about it, we might save much more doing without employees
which make such moronic proposals instead of what we pay them
for...
> I think you grossly underestimate most of the users and grossly
> overestimate the lost productivity.
I think that you have no exact idea of how most big companies and big
public administrations work. I'm *not* saying the list above does
always make sense, but it *is* how many big organization decide.
Private individuals and small businesses are an entirely different
situation, of course. Ditto for single, largely autonomous departments
or offices of a bigger organization.
I must also add one observation to all the above. In all the previous
answers to this thread, I have not seen yet the most important. What
when they tell you:
"don't tell me how much I'd save switching. It is still a tiny
*fraction* of my total costs, so tell me *WHY* I should switch if what
I have today *does* the job and we know in advance that some things
(macros) would not work"
> >OOo is no where near ready for corporations. Not ones that aren't
> >in direct competition with Microsoft anyway. That's the only reason
> >IBM, Sun, and Novell use OOo - they don't want to use Microsoft.
Exactly. Sad but exact. I do agree that OO.o is ready for prime time,
but only for somebody starting from scratch or has (at least in
theory) non-profit goals (ie lawmakers). Not for corporations who have
thousands of gigabytes worth of existing files to keep in use, and
have not written in their mission statement to _not_ use the office
suite of a competitor.
Ciao,
Marco
--
Marco Fioretti mfioretti, at the server mclink.it
Fedora Core 3 for low memory http://www.rule-project.org/
Live simply so others may simply live. Ghandi
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