On 10/28/2010 09:39 AM, Frank Esposito wrote: > > We should also include government as well, that seems to be where adoption > is currently high. how about religious organizations? > > > So we have: > Government (local and National) > Business > Non profit organizations > Education (all grades) > Personal users
Last year, I pushed hard to get a few of my area rural municipal governments to adopt OpenOffice. I met with representatives of about 15 small Oklahoma towns and did a few presentations (all designed in OpenOffice - eat the dog food!) In the end, none of them really saw any value in migrating. Their points were: 1. Microsoft provided us the software through a grant, we didn't have to pay anything so money isn't an issue. 2. Document conversion isn't 100% accurate in many cases and we have regulations we have to follow that require that they be accurate. 3. Retraining costs would be extremely high. Everyone knows MS Office, nobody knows OpenOffice. We're a small government and can't afford retraining. 4. There will be massive pushback because the skills aren't transferable and make people effectively useless in other jobs that use MS Office. I think we should address a few of these points in whatever evangelism we do towards local or national governments. Federal government in the USA has historically been suspicious and wary of open source software. That's dramatically changed over the last few years but, in some agencies, it's still there to a degree. Religious organizations are another are where costs and document portability might not be a major concern because everyone is using the same thing so there are no problems and, in many cases, Microsoft has donated the software or provided it under a grant for no out of pocket expense. We're dealing with a very savvy competitior in Microsoft that is willing to do whatever it takes to win. Whatever we come up with is going to have to be just as savvy and beat them at their own game. Anthony -- E-mail to marketing+h...@libreoffice.org for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.libreoffice.org/lists/marketing/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
