On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 12:28 -0800, Christina Godinez wrote: > I believe that Open Office is just a good as Microsoft... Microsoft is just > a status symbol... a lot of user think that just because it's free, it's not > as good as Microsoft. Look at firefox, it free and more secure the internet > explorer... > > "Fred A. Miller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: "Some smart white box retailers > are now cottoning on to the fact that they can > offer Linux based systems running Open Office.org on the same computers to > customers for hundreds of dollars cheaper than the Microsoft versions. The > challenge for Microsoft, which has become addicted to making huge profits > from selling its commodity software, is how it can convince customers that > continuing to pay through the nose for its brand of software is worth it. For > Microsoft, that is becoming an increasingly harder sell." > > http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/3272/106/ >
I've been using Star/OpenOffice since the original Star Division Star Office free release for Linux. I haven't run MS Windows as my working system at work or at home since Slackware Linux first appeared back in the early 90's. So I'm not battling against the MS 'habit' when I'm looking at how things are done in OOo. In the article url above, the author says: "Globally there have so far only been a few cases of corporations, government departments and educational institutions opting to go for Open Office.org. However, the buzz is starting to get louder and most CIOs are at least considering the option." Speaking to a few people in government and other large organisations, the problem isn't the quality of OOo. These institutions have huge investments in Windows-based applications. I don't mean off-the-shelf Windows software, but in-house developed, contract developed, and heavily customised and integrated enterprise wide systems based on Windows components. Microsoft works very hard at 'owning' their clients. The mere fact that OpenOffice is making headway here is a huge testament to it's quality. You can be certain that they won't be adopting OOo because it's free. And once you get away from MS applications there's no real need to stay with Windows - which is why most organisations that plan to migrate start with applications like OOo on Windows as a transition to Linux or Sun thin clients - although Intel seems to be the hardware of choice for commodity compute power. Every IS manager knows that document archival in a proprietary format is a growing problem. But it's going to take years for managers to plan and implement change. Some are no-doubt gambling that Microsoft will bring out a truly open document format of their own, but if and when they do everything points to it retaining some proprietary lock-in components, or perhaps even a fully open but patented technology designed to keep competitors from being fully compatible. A couple of years ago the National Archives of Australia started a project called XENA which is based on OOo for converting and storing electronic documents - http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=1991153367&fp=16&fpid=0 The system they've developed is also free to others under the GPL. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
