M. Fioretti wrote:
On Mon, January 21, 2008 4:58 am, Aaron Kulkis wrote:
With AutoCad, the better approach is to get them to port
to Linux....
Of course, this is difficult to do as individuals, but
small to medium-sized IT departments can. You tell the
AutoCad rep that the company's strategic direction is
to move from Winows XP to Linux, and that if they want
to continue selling, they have to keep up. IF not,
you're going to be buying SDRC Ideas, or some other
product that fits into your company's plans to NOT
migrate to Vista.
The threat of permanent loss of sales is an excellant
motivator to these sorts of companies.
The problem is that such threats are only plausible if the customer
doesn't have plenty of data locked in a format that only Autocad
can fully understand, or will never receive from partners or potential
customers files in such formats that need to be read or modified. Not
really likely, see:
cfr the Autocad paragraph and links in the second part of:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/focus_format_history/
There are industry standard file formats for CAD/CAM, and
AutoCad can export and import to those formats.
Same scenario here:
Once Linux captures a significant share of business desktops
this won't happen until those business users continue to receive
(or are required to send) files in the latest Microsoft Office formats,
whatever that is in any given moment.
In both cases, the most effective strategy, even if it's unglamourous,
to get to the point where you can really do everything you need under
Linux may be to demand laws that force all Public Administrations to
only accept, store or distribute files in non proprietary formats, or
at least formats that are 100% guaranteed to be fully usable under any
operating system, with _more_ than one software program.
That helps.
Once businesses know that to keep selling goods or services to the state
or city Government they MUST deliver contracts, bids, technical drawings,
whatever, in formats that are completely usable with any operating sytems,
the rest will happen by itself.
Very true. Which is why MS is paranoid about ODF.
And much sooner than if we wait for businesses who couldn't care less
of the license of the software they use, not when changing it would make
their existing files less readable (= interfere with "business as usual").
Marco
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