On Wed, 28 Jun 2000, jim t.p. ryan wrote:
> I have to agree with you to a point about your historical examples and
> how change occurs. But those were the days when everything was new.
> Today we�ve reached a point where the system in place is so widespread
> that change becomes harder and harder.
Poppycock. Lotus had a strangle hold on the market for spreadsheets for
years. It's no different.
> Where you work what do they use for their daily office operations like
> email client, word processor, spreadsheets, and presentations?
Mostly Netscape for e-mail, though we do have a lot of people using emacs,
mutt, or pine. A few people use M$ Outbreak.
> I just can�t envision the sales department being told they have to
> start using a laptop with Linux and Applixware to get in front of
> customers with. Or the CEO�s secretary telling her boss that she has
> to fix all the formatting changes that happened to the critical
> document that was just emailed to her from another CEO�s secretary in
> Word.
These things are easy to envision. Easier still to envision with some of
the upcomming OSS office packages, especially KOffice, which looks really
sharp. KPresent looks awesome, much better indeed than Powerpoint, IMO.
But then again, I haven't really used either, and I'm definitely biased.
> Maybe as new startups grow they will bring in Linux on the desktop
> from the onset,
People are already doing this...
> but I don�t see Liberty Mutual or Fidelity doing it
> anytime soon.
Well for a company of that size, of course not. Changing over your
infrastructure when you're that big is extremely painful. But that
doesn't mean it won't happen slowly.
> I�m not even sure how important it is to be on the
> desktop. But then I like Office. Sure it�s bloated, but for me it�s
> just a known tool. I can go in and bang out a document or a
> spreadsheet in no time at all.
I've yet to see a word processor that I couldn't "bang out a document in
no time at all" with. They're just not that hard to use, unless you need
to do advanced typesetting types of things, and most people just don't. As
for spreadsheets, we've already said that Gnumeric works exactly like
excel... what more do you need?
> I�d rather spend time learning an OS like Linux then waste time
> trying to figure out how to open up a word document in Star Office and
> retain the formatting.
Don't USE word, and you won't have to worry about it. Virtually anything
else is far, far more portable.
> Or worse yet trying to teach some admin support person how to do it.
> I have spent a LOT of time doing that in the past as DEC moved from
> WPS+ on VMS to PC�s and WordPerfect or Word. In fact that shows how
> once the OS gets in the door, the rest follows.
What we are saying (or at least what I am saying) is build work-alikes,
except without the bugs and bloat... There will be no retraining issues.
> If users had Office on their Linux box the transition to other
> applications would be a lot less painless for them.
Heehee... Anything involving Microsoft is much less painless to me. :)
> But throw a new OS and the applications and you have a much harder
> road to go.
Bah. The user interface is already nearly identical. You simply need
your new work-alike applications' installs to throw icons up on the
desktop, and you're there.
> By the way, I still want to know how the free thing works. If I use
> an open source Word Processor and I�m a home user (non-technical), and
> I want to know how to set up columns for a three fold document I�m
> making who do I call?
Read the bloody documentation. It's free, you might as well read it.
> Sooner or later SOMEBODY has to paid for something don�t they? I have
> never felt that I got screwed by Microsoft. I have bought a product
> knowing what it was, eyes open. I�ts not perfect but it does what I
> want it to do at least as much as any other software product that I
> have bought, or downloaded for that matter.
So you want your applications to randomly crash, periodically losing your
data for you? Need any other software? I'm sure I could whip something
that does that up for you!
> How come nobody is screaming at Netscape?
People are screaming at Netscape. And Mozilla is open source. Tada!
> Netscape on Linux, is a piece of crap. It�s usable, but I don�t think
> anybody can honestly deny that browsing the web under Windows and
> Explorer 5 is a better overall experience than doing it in Linux with
> Netscape stability aside.
I can. When I use netscape on Linux, I don't get all the annoying pop-up
boxes that IE gives you to do things such as set up your internet
connection, despite the fact that you're directly connected via LAN.
Netscape is far far easier and more intuitive to configure, in my opinion.
And while I know lots of people have stability issues, I seem to be rather
fortunate in that I rarely have a problem there.
I quite like netscape. Though I agree it could be better, and I'd really
like to see some alternatives. But I don't see this as a huge deal. Also,
Opera is excellent. I've used it before (on windows, haven't seen the
linux version), and it's small and fast, and does a very nice job of
rendering pages.
> This is where energy should be focused. Netscape is the only major
> browser available to us in Linux. I know about Opera and I�m sure
> there are others, but Netscape comes with Linux (uh oh, don�t tell
> that to the justice dept.)
Netscape comes with everything these days. It's free. I got a copy of it
with my toilet paper the other day. The justice department won't care,
because Netscape isn't leveraging any kind of monopoly power over the
industry.
> and as such is the one that gets used.
Now that I think of it, KDE 2.0 supposedly has a really nice browser built
into it. So go get that. Maybe people will start using that instead of
netscape once distributions start shipping with it.
> Maybe AOL should take a few people out of the CD mailing division and
> get them working on their browser�;+}
You obviously hadn't heard about the open sourcing of Netscape...
--
Derek Martin
System Administrator
Mission Critical Linux
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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