I think both sides of the argument are a bit disingenuous. If you listen to the open-source side and take their arguments at face value, it never makes sense to buy software. If you listen to Microsoft, using open source products is no better than trying to solder 1s and 0s directly onto your hard drive.
One point that MS is constantly hammering home and the OSS community is looking away from, whistling as if it didn't exist, is "total cost of ownership" (TCO.) This is a big consideration for the business customer. One hundred licenses for MS Office may cost US$50,000, but if it takes 8 hours to retrain each employee and those employees make an average of US$25/hr, it costs US$20,000 in lost productivity to switch to OOo plus the cost of the trainer. If it takes three technicians a full day to install and configure OOo on those machines, that costs real money. If each of the users loses 2 hours of productivity trying to figure out things they already knew how to do in Microsoft Office, that's another US$5,000 down the tubes. These things add up quickly. I don't see OOo making huge inroads into the business market until it has saturated the markets where its TCO is much lower than Microsoft's--the home market and specifically the student market. While there's no such thing as "free time" in the business world, it's often an abundant commodity in the student market. Even if you count each hour spent on learning OOo as an opportunity cost, it makes a lot more sense for someone who's netting US$10 an hour to spend sixteen hours learning a free-as-in-beer product than it does to spend US$500 on the alternative and work 50 hours to pay for it. Only when there's an installed user base for OOo coming out of the universities and high schools will it become a more attractive option to the business software market. Retraining costs are a huge consideration when buying new software. Quite without meaning to, I've moved almost exclusively to OSS and shareware tools at home and for my hobbies. Firefox, Thunderbird, OOo, GIMP, UltraEdit, GAIM, MediaWiki, PHP, Firebird, and CuteFTP take up 95% of my "me time" on the computer. At work, I make decisions about software purchases all the time. Here, we use MS Office, MS SQL Server, Visual Studio, and a host of Microsoft server products because the free alternatives are just too expensive. --Jekke -----Original Message----- From: Christina Godinez [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 1:06 PM To: [email protected]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [users] Microsoft says Open Office.org 10 years behind I don't think MS users has a choice. Once you switch to MS or upgrade to the new MS version, YOU ARE STUCK.... that's how they make a lot of money... Robin Laing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Fred A. Miller wrote: > One would expect this. > > Fred > > http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/3517/106/ > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- For users around here, 10 years behind is an improvement if "they" can "control" what the software "does" to their work. MS Office is a big problem with many workers around here. They cannot get the formatting to work the way they want and need. There are those times that MS Office decides to change the formatting of a document and won't undo. Have you ever heard a grown man scream after 3 hours of work just went down the tubes because of this? It isn't pleasant. Sure MS is making many major changes in their next version of Office but if the reports are correct, it won't sell with workers if their productivity is greatly affected. How many workers will complain and want to go back to the "Old Version?" Are gadgets too complex for us? http://news.com.com/Are+gadgets+too+complex+for+us/2100-1041_3-6046314.h tml -- Robin Laing --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------- Yahoo! Mail Bring photos to life! New PhotoMail makes sharing a breeze. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
