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ummh a Freudian slip lol. just kidding
Jim ben_myers_spam_me_not @ charter.net (Ben Myers) wrote in message ... I meant to say: "I do not count myself as a friend of Microsoft and I take every possible opportunity to evaluate, use, and promote the use of NON-Microsoft products." Wash my mouth out with soap! ... Ben On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 02:04:04 GMT, ben_myers_spam_me_not @ charter.net (Ben Myers) wrote: Interchange of .DOC and .XLS files is not the BIG issue here. The issues here are training less-than-brilliant people to use a new and slightly different software package (e.g. OpenOffice), then suffering through all the problems which ensue when converting documents and spreadsheets to and from Microsoft Office formats. For one or two people, a small family or even a small and isolated company, these are not problems. For large companies, training and loss of productivity can quickly eat up the savings from using non-Microsoft Office products. I once worked in an organization that thought it could provide the ultimate in perfect conversion of documents from one format to another. They failed. Believe me, it ain't easy. Just when OpenOffice gets it right with 99.9% of document conversion, Microsoft (like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown) adds more bells and whistles to the next release of Office, a moving target. NOBODY advertises PERFECT document interchange with Office. Except Microsoft, who even had to be pushed by irate customers into providing two-way document compatibility between Office 95 and Office 97. Still, some organizations are so fed up with Microsoft's high-handed practices and pricing that they ARE moving to non-Microsoft products. Several governmental units in Germany are buying inexpensive Linux boxes to replace their Windows machines. The anti-Microsoft sentiment in Europe is and always has been very strong. China is not exactly in love with Microsoft, either. Any groundswell of movement away from Microsoft Office is most likely to begin outside the US. Microsoft's dominance is very much comparable to IBM's position with mainframes in the '70s. It took an absolutely seismic paradigm shift (crappy buzzwords, but accurate in their depiction) to reduce IBM's role in the computer industry to a much less influential one. And, of course, the seismic paradigm shift was the introduction of personal computers by the self-same IBM, and the subsequent rapid deployment of them by all and sundry. Moving everybody from Windows & Office to Linux & Open Office is not the type of seismic shift that will make serious inroads into Microsoft's dominant position. And, anyway, it is extremely unlikely to happen, unfortunately. I do not count myself as a friend of Microsoft and I take every possible opportunity to evaluate, use, and promote the use of Microsoft products. But the sad fact remains that unless many large organizations get so totally ****ed off with Microsoft that they do a wholesale move away from Windows and Office (and several collaborative "server" products such as Exchange Server), we are stuck with Office for a long long time. Now, if you can foresee the seismic paradigm shift that will unseat Microsoft from its software dominance, make your investments now, 'cause you'll end up fabulously wealthy... Ben Myers On 21 Aug 2004 15:06:27 -0700, (Sam Byrams) wrote: Apparently you are to daft to really understand how the real world works. Your output from a particular program has to be able to be used by THE OTHER PRODUCTIVITY PACKAGES you refer to. Yes there are other packages available and as soon as you get a few hundred million machines running them then you may have a somewhat valid point. But right now you are ****ing in the wind with little information to really back it up. You are under a powerful narcotic, apparently manufactured in Redmond, that makes people unable to comprehend that other programs can generate, accept, and convert M$ Word and Excel files. They can. You do not need M$ Word to read Word files. Further, the only reason to produce a .doc file is so that you can Print the file and send it on as a physical letter. .pdf files work a lot better if you need a 'virtual document'. |
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