On Wed, 5 Oct 2005, Uri Even-Chen wrote:
It's not just a perception. I checked. And I'm a computer geek,
A computer geek on this list is an OO user ;-)
When I upgraded from Word 97 to Office 2000 I also had some problems of incompatibility. Some old documents looked differently with Office 2000. But once you upgrade a document, you don't use it with the old Office version. So you need to upgrade each document only once. And
For each of the about 100 documents/day produced in a small office, over the last cca. 3-4 years, including those on backup disks from the previous 3-4 years, and the Einstein documents since before that ? Dear Uri, how many mice would you have to click to death to achieve that ? Who would pay you ? Oh, wait, there are commercial solutions for that. You could *gasp* buy a document converter that would upgrade your documents to go with your system upgrade. What a nice menagerie.
the changes are minor (mainly in Hebrew documents).
Do you have to find them visually ? Is the remedial action different for each file ? Do you think that Massachusetts decided to switch to a non-Word format by accident ?
If you want to migrate a file from one office software to another - you have to be a computer geek. Ordinary people just can't handle it. And MS knows it.
Right. And public libraries, county registrars, notaries, lawyers, the courts, the police, the government standards office and three dozen other categories of people who keep records for slightly longer than 2-3 years (not to say more than 2000 years in certain cases) should use Word formats because they are 'compatible'. This year. What about next year ? We upgrade ? On taxpayer's money ? Suuure we do. How many times do you think this trick is going to work ? A visit from a nouveau riche 'illustrious' person and we give it another go ? Maybe not.
I am surprised that no opposition politicians have taken this small matter of squandering public funds on a pyramid scheme of 'upgrading' and done something about it in their political campaign. After all, there is a lot of money to be saved. Just think about how many licenses it costs to keep the .gov.il computers upgraded and 'compatible'.
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