While all of what you say makes logical sense, none of it meshes with my experience.
Cost of retraining is one aspect of TCO as is the initial sticker price of the software. I agree that there is a retraining cost involved with upgrading MS-Office, but nothing in the link provided suggests it's going to be worse than the upgrade from Outlook 2001 to 2003, which did nothing to slow sales of Outlook or send millions of business users scrambling to download Thunderbird. The Microsoft salesdroid is right in saying that, while most users use less than half the features in Microsoft Office, in a large organization, you're pretty much guaranteed to find someone who's using each feature. For 90% of the functionality, OOo is functionally identical to MS Office, but if the 10% that's different takes up 50% of a user's time, that's a steep hurdle to climb in terms of TCO. As for support finding OOo cheaper and easier to support than the next version of Microsoft Office, you must work with very different support people than any I've ever met. The mantra of my IT department seems to be that change costs money. And, the replacement of MS Office's high-end feature set with OOo's high end feature set would be far more expensive than the difference in initial cost is worth. --Jekke -----Original Message----- From: Lars D. Noodén [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 2:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [users] Microsoft says Open Office.org 10 years behind On Tue, 7 Mar 2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [snip] > 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.) ... but if it takes 8 hours to retrain each employee [snip] What you are referring to is not TCO, but cost of retraining. It's going to be there no matter what applications you change. However, if the changes are big enough those retraining costs will be real and they will be big. In the case of MSO 2007, it would probably cheaper for M$ users to move to OpenOffice or KOffice than MSO 2007 : http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/02/microsoft_offic.html Since I've seen extremely non-technical people doing homework for the MS Office class on OpenOffice.org 2, both kids and adults, and I've seen other non-technical people confuse Openoffice.org Writer (and for that matter AppleWorks) with MS Word, I no longer give any credibility to whines about re-training costs between such similar applications. I even know one retiree who had been testing OOo along side the familiar (to him) MS Office. One morning he got an e-mail with a document, opened it, reviewed the revisions, made his own and sent it off, all before realising he had used OOo instead of MSO. After that there was not even any psychological reasons to keep using MSO -- it was out of there for good. Interfaces for most F/OSS tools have come a long way since the 1980's, most users don't notice the difference. If you want to bring TCO into the picture, then the support staff will probably find OOo easier ( == cheaper ) to maintain and support. -Lars Lars Nooden ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Keep the market open by keeping software patents out: http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/indprop/patent/consultation_en.htm --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
