> > Last year, I pushed hard to get a few of my area rural municipal > governments to adopt OpenOffice. I met with representatives of about 15 > small Oklahoma towns and did a few presentations (all designed in > OpenOffice - eat the dog food!) In the end, none of them really saw any > value in migrating. > > Their points were: > > 1. Microsoft provided us the software through a grant, we didn't have to > pay anything so money isn't an issue. > > 2. Document conversion isn't 100% accurate in many cases and we have > regulations we have to follow that require that they be accurate. > > 3. Retraining costs would be extremely high. Everyone knows MS Office, > nobody knows OpenOffice. We're a small government and can't afford > retraining. > > 4. There will be massive pushback because the skills aren't transferable > and make people effectively useless in other jobs that use MS Office. > > I think we should address a few of these points in whatever evangelism > we do towards local or national governments. Federal government in the > USA has historically been suspicious and wary of open source software. > That's dramatically changed over the last few years but, in some > agencies, it's still there to a degree. > > Religious organizations are another are where costs and document > portability might not be a major concern because everyone is using the > same thing so there are no problems and, in many cases, Microsoft has > donated the software or provided it under a grant for no out of pocket > expense. > > We're dealing with a very savvy competitior in Microsoft that is willing > to do whatever it takes to win. Whatever we come up with is going to > have to be just as savvy and beat them at their own game. > > Anthony > >
Very good points and I agree, at least in the States, it is a Microsoft world. so maybe we should concentrate on ODF benefits and then market towards businesses who are still running MSO 2003 and cannot afford the upgrade and training to MSO 2007/2010 (which is considerable thanks to the ribbon). Other options could be getting the Microsoft file converters in LO work work perfectly to import old documents and then save in ODF, and also give the option to reconfigure the menus and toolbars to mirror MSO2003 (for ease of conversion). The marketing angle could be: "LibreOffice: Upgrade from MSO 2003 with full compatibility and no retraining costs." Essentially an updated, FOSS drop-in replacement for MSO. Once that happens we can then build brand-loyalty and users will continue with LO instead of MSO and LO can then create its own path, just as Microsoft did to WordPerfect and Quatro Pro. -Frank -- E-mail to marketing+h...@libreoffice.org for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.libreoffice.org/lists/marketing/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
