M. Fioretti wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 22, 2007 15:42:04 PM +0300, Lars Noodén
> ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
>
>> M. Fioretti wrote:
>>
>>> Forgetting this fact of life is an all too common mistakes of
>>> several FOSS advocates, who fail to reach people because they seem
>>> always to give for granted that everybody _loves_ software hacking
>>> and flexibility.
>> No. I can't stand it.
>
> Er... sorry, what is exactly that you cannot stand?
I do not like mucking about with systems and applications. I want to
*use* them not fiddle with them endlessly. That's probably my main
attraction to FOSS and what got me (re-)started with FOSS. It's also a
strong reason why I have come to despise the low quality of MS products.
A growing problem from the MS side now is a growing entanglement between
formats, data, applications, servers, and operating systems.
>> One can make a strong case that one of the main reasons Novell
>> Netware lost marketshare to MS in the late 90's was that Netware
>> more or less ran by itself and needed little or no attention. Often
>> leaving no ongoing technical crises to keep staff on.
>
> I'm not sure how this is relevant to the initial point I made. I mean,
> was Netware to be used by normal employees like MS or Open Office?
Yes. However, the only part that the end user saw was the 'L:', 'W:',
'X:' drive or other DOS-legacy nonsense. The Netware severs more or
less ran themselves and were used to store, share and collaborate on
files. MS immitation of that function fails so badly that it's probably
the main reason for the big market in USB flash drives.
At that time users could concentrate on working with the applications nd
not spend any blood, sweat and tears on simple stuff like file transfer.
> Does Netware, or anything of the kind, create a lock through
> proprietary file formats even remotely comparable to what MS Office
> does?
No. Which was another reason why it was easy to force out. It worked
well with several platforms. The MS immitation didn't really work and
very clearly didn't work with non-MS platforms and it has more and more
locks into other MS products.
We've had about a decade's worth of constant bleating now from the 'IT'
depts during which we've seen several cycles of the following:
1) it'll work when it's all MS
2) no, really it'll work when it's all the same version of MS
3) no, really,this time it'll work when the number of servers
is double
4) no, really, truly, this time it'll work once we start
using the Next Version of MS
5) goto step #2 and repeat
>> Based on my observations in institutions and businesses that *do
>> not* use software as anything much more than a glorified typewriter
>> or calculator MS is used not because it increases productivity, but
>> rather the opposite.
>
> Lars, come on. MS is used simply because it's there and because (until
> it will be forced to manage opendocument) it has already locked
> billions of documents in proprietary file formats.
No. Unless you are extremely new to computing, many other tools where
in place first. MS boosters worked like hell from within institutions
and businesses. That includes tools like file servers, print servers,
authentication servers, mail servers and clients, and productivity
applications.
>> using FOSS or even a hybrid like OS X allows the machines to be
>> installed and forgotten, thus permitting everyone to get back to
>> work.
>
> No, sorry, but this is the crucial point. This is not true. Using FOSS
> on the desktop in any *already existing* large organization (I don't
> know much about OS X) means (on the desktop, backends are indeed a
> different issues):
>
> 1) _stop_ operations to migrate and maybe train employees. This alone
> can be a showstopper, even if it happens one department at a
> time. It officially was one in a big company where I worked
Wrong. Many people can pick up Firefox and OpenOffice.org from the
get-go and some may not even notice a thing. Upgrading the applications
is the first step.
Training is overblown. One anecdote there was when I tried to demo how
to use a file server to some hospital and library staff, I had only
AppleWorks and OpenOffice.org available. Having used both on different
machines, at the conclusion, they were bragging about having used "MS
Word" for the exercises in refering to AppleWorks and
> 2) scream for and waste time for several months, every time you need a
> old .doc file and OO.o cannot display it properly.
That's not an OOo problem. You get that when using MS Word on a
different machine. The problem gets worse if you are using a different
version of MS Windows or MS Office than the creator.
Yes. I am writing about the desktop here. The servers are a whole
other can of worms. Anyway, at least until InfoPath/SharePoint get into
place it is still possible to do a phased rollout - such as is taught in
elementary software engineering.
Regards,
-Lars
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