On Tue, 7 Mar 2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
[snip]
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,
The cost of retraining for MSO 2007 is significant:
"Power users can probably worm their way through, though
there are enough advanced features that they'll almost
certainly screw something up without proper documentation.
...
But average users will be lost if confronted with these screens
out of the blue, and you'll wind up with a help desk nightmare.
Moreover, it's easy to see that this version is going to impact
even network and desktop administrators in a big way."
- http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/11/24/48OPenterwin_1.html
which did nothing to slow sales of Outlook or send millions of business
users scrambling to download Thunderbird.
Outlook is bundled, not distributed separately.
Anyway, the IT department takes care of the downloads and usually decides
what software will be installed. So nothing is going to "send millions of
business users scrambling" for anything.
... 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.
Rip-n-replace is a myth propagated by Ballmer. Don't fall for it. Any
competent IT department would have a phased rollout starting with a pilot
or two to figure out an effective strategy. 90% or more of your non-power
users won't notice the difference with OOo.
... 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.
That's my point. The difference for the user between MSO XP or 2003 and
MS 2007 is much larger than between MSO XP or 2003 and OOo 2.
-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
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