Re: [discuss] Re: OOo and OpenDocument mentioned in TheAge
On Wed, 23 Mar 2005, Christian Einfeldt wrote: ... Currently, Microsoft's solution is to try to buy the market by lobbying (bribing) local officials, giving its software to some libraries and schools, and offering package deals to governments like Thailand. But that is not a sustainable business model for a company whose revenue is primarily derived from the SALES of the software itself! Hence the move for proprietary formats and DRM to get hold of people's data. MS is going for broke in this regard, to use their influence as a political / ideological movement to get enough customers' data locked in to pull them through to the next development/marketing cycle. Windows and Microsoft Office are becoming commodities, and it is difficult to base a market-leader on the sales of low-margin commodities I'm starting to suspect that when most people say Windows they mean a graphical user interface with a windowing system.* Likewise, when many (most?) people say Word or Office they really mean a word processor or a productivity suite. That means the missing piece is simple that people have been brainwashed / brow beaten into forgetting that there are viable choices out there. Also, data formats have been taken for granted. Few (no one?) thinks it's weird that the same file can be read by Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox, Opera, Cameleon, etc. Strangely, few think it's weird that word processors can't deal with files from their competitors. Technically, that's changing now with OpenDocument. I'm not expecting a great change in awareness, however, I am expecting a great change in behavior and expectations. -Lars * I bet this could be studied quickly and easily. Lars Nooden ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Software patents kill innovation and harm all Net-based business. Keep them out of the EU by writing your MEP, keep the market open. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [discuss] Re: OOo and OpenDocument mentioned in TheAge
Hi Daniel, Since Solaris has been open sourced, why switch to Linux? Just curious really. is there a difference in support costs or something? Or are there apps that run on Linux but not Solaris? We need to replace these computers, and we want to go to x86 hardware because it's cheaper. Since we're already replacing computers, the relative effort of a Linux migration is much lower. Besides, where do get a free Solaris distro anyways? If you mean free as in beer, the point to get Solaris 10, either for SPARC or x86 architectures, is http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp. I'm not sure about the precise state of the freedom as in speech at the moment. Cyrille - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [discuss] Re: OOo and OpenDocument mentioned in TheAge
On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 03:58 -0500, Lars D. Noodén wrote: Also, remember that many IT departments have had the functional equivalent of an MS sales team working on the inside since 5 or 6 years ago. So they will be resisitant to other vendors / sources, but as Christian points out with demi-Moore's Law, after a certain point that inertia will be in the favor of open document formats. Witness the change from proprietary networking protocols in the 60's, 70's, and 80's to open ones. Not quite an analogous situation. The real battle was between two open standards - ISO/OSI and TCP/IP. TCP/IP won because it was in fact implementable across a wide range of platforms even though it lacked a killer app. ISO/OSI was never really implementable and was in fact an effort of the PTTs to maintain their monopoly over data communications. The killer app or rather protocols for TCP/IP and the Internet was HTML and HTTP. This really tipped the balance in the 1990s and even forced Microsoft to acknowledge the Internet and TCP/IP as a fact of computing life which further snowballed the wide adoption of TCP/IP and Internet centric technologies. -- Smoot Carl-Mitchell System/Network Architect email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cell: +1 602 421 9005 home: +1 480 922 7313 - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [discuss] Re: OOo and OpenDocument mentioned in TheAge
On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 18:27, Chuck wrote: Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote: On Wed, 2005-03-23 at 12:12 -0800, Christian Einfeldt wrote: High School, in Portland, Oregon. IMHO, the day is only about 3 years away when people will wonder why they ever paid for an office suite, just the way that people now wonder why they ever paid for a browser. (I actually paid for Netscape, twice!) I think it is even less time than 3 years. My guess is it is within 2 years. Same will be true for the OS market. The winners in this new world will be the companies who can leverage the Open Source commons and build convenient services from the modular components available in the commons. I've been hearing that for decades. The truth is corporations will not embrace free software until they have guaranteed support a phone call away. They can already buy that for most mainstream OSS. Sun, Novel, IBM, Redhat etc etc. Is there such a number for OOo? Yes, ring Sun. They will sell anyone a support contract for OOo. Look on the web site, there are plenty of commercial companies that support OOo. My company in the UK is just one example. Until there is, it will never be more than that unsupported (from the corporations standpoint that is) software on the desk of a few technically savvy individuals, sitting alongside a fully supported commercial product. This view is about 2-3 years out of date. I think Smoot is pretty well informed. While Windows and office won't disappear in 2 years, at the present increasing rate of take up, we will get past a critical point where there will be no turning back and OSS will become an everyday and increasingly obvious part of everyone's lives. -- Ian Lynch [EMAIL PROTECTED] ZMS Ltd - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [discuss] Re: OOo and OpenDocument mentioned in TheAge
Hi, Sorry for not snipping, but I wanted to be able to preserve the full context. On Wednesday 23 March 2005 08:26, Chuck wrote: Lars D. Noodén wrote: OOo and OpenDocument both get a mention towards the middle of the article: Nigel McFarlane. Firefox explorers. The Age. 22 Mar 2005. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/03/21/253920087.html ?oneclick=true ... I'm staggered and close to offended that some businesses choose the risk of vendor lock-in, and I'm staggered by the timidity of some IT managers, he says. I think the problem is that nobody wants to be the manager who recommended software that was later found out to have some incompatibility with MS file formats, the format that 98% of the rest of the business world uses. This story reflects what Bhaskar Chakravorti calls demi-Moore's law. For those of you who like Clayton Christensen, you will also be interested in Chakravorti's book, The Slow Pace of Fast Change. Basically Chakravorti unpacks the chicken-and-egg problem of how to get a new innovation like OOo into a highly networked market like the software market. Basically, demi-Moore's law says that technology will be adopted at somewhat less than the pace of innovation, in part, because demand and supply side players hang back to see which way competitive battles will play out, and then everyone jumps on board when it becomes apparent which way the shift is going to lean. It's what Chakravorti calls the inefficiencies of networked economies. Here is a link for Chakravorti's book: http://www.slowpacefastchange.com/ To me and our film, The Digital Tipping Point, the interesting thing is the time of approaching the point where demi-Moore's law runs in reverse. To me, that is why we will see a rather dramatic tipping point in the adoption of GNU/Linux and OOo and other free open source software projects. At some point, there are going to be enough major demand side players and supply side players who are using OOo that demi-Moore's law will run in reverse, and the inefficiencies of the networked software market will start to run in FAVOR of OOo, and AGAINST Microsoft! So Chakravorti works well with Christensen's team because Christensen's team explains the MOTIVATION for individual overshot customers to adopt FLOSS; and Chakravorti gives us sort of a fly-over shot of which way demi-Moore's law is running, and how fast. Another interesting thing about this demi-Moore's law is that it helps you (or at least me) think of how to when the digital tipping point might arrive, using tide flows as an analogy. Here in San Francisco, we have huge tide changes. The whole huge San Francisco Bay flows out through the relatively narrow Golden Gate which is spanned by the Golden Gate Bridge. Sometimes when the tide change is really big, say an eight foot (2.5 meter) difference, you can almost feel slackwater approaching. A big tide change means that all the water that wanted to rush out of the Bay now wants to rush back in. So at the height of the on-coming tide, standing on the Golden Gate Bridge, you can look down from the Bridge and see the water flowing rapidly into the Bay, like some raging river almost. As slackwater approaches, you can feel the river slow down, and then there is a curious bit of time where the Bay is still at the height of slackwater. Then, several hours later, the river is flowing back out to the Pacific Ocean, once again at a surprisingly quick clip for such a large body of water. Major ocean liners will time their arrival into the bay to coincide with an in-coming tide, rather than risk the fuel and rocks at the mouth of the bay in the fury of the out-going tide. I'm a lawyer, and have been working in the law in once capacity or another since 1985, and I remember when the tide of demi-Moore's law switched against WordPerfect and in favor of Microsoft Word. It seemed that OVERNIGHT most users, and even most law firms, switched en masse from WP to Word. I was shocked, because I thought (and still think) that WP was vastly superior to Word. But Word was a disruptive technology for WP, and a sustaining technology for Microsoft. Word was more convenient to acquire and use. This was a classic example of demi-Moore's law and disruption acting in concert. Word came easily pre-packaged in many cases with Windows (ease of acquisition) and Word was more easy to use than WordPerfect (mostly because Microsoft broke WordPerfect on Windows). Microsoft had connections in its Windows OEM distribution channel (ease of acquisition) that WP could not match, and so it was able to incent key supply-side players into cooperating. Before Microsoft used its lock-in power, no supply-side player could touch WordPerfect, the unquestioned market leader. IMHO, the same thing is going to happen to OOo and Word. Obviously, the difference is that currently, there is
Re: [discuss] Re: OOo and OpenDocument mentioned in TheAge
On Wed, 2005-03-23 at 16:50, Daniel Carrera wrote: Chuck wrote: I have OOo installed on my laptop and love it (don't tell my workstation support group though or they'll remove it as unsupported software). When I buy my new XP home PC this week, OOo will be installed and not MS or Corel. But I wouldn't dare save a shared document at work with it. I haven't come across file format problems yet but I don't want to be the one responsible for corrupting a file that 20 other people are using and have to explain why I was using OOo instead of Word or Excel to my boss. Over here, all the Solaris workstations are running StarOffice. The Windows PCs are running MS Office. We are planning to switch the Solaris boxes to Linux over the next year or two. Since Solaris has been open sourced, why switch to Linux? Just curious really. is there a difference in support costs or something? Or are there apps that run on Linux but not Solaris? -- Ian Lynch [EMAIL PROTECTED] ZMS Ltd - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [discuss] Re: OOo and OpenDocument mentioned in TheAge
Ian Lynch wrote: Since Solaris has been open sourced, why switch to Linux? Just curious really. is there a difference in support costs or something? Or are there apps that run on Linux but not Solaris? We need to replace these computers, and we want to go to x86 hardware because it's cheaper. Since we're already replacing computers, the relative effort of a Linux migration is much lower. Besides, where do get a free Solaris distro anyways? Cheers, -- Daniel Carrera | I don't want it perfect, Join OOoAuthors today! | I want it Tuesday. http://oooauthors.org | - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [discuss] Re: OOo and OpenDocument mentioned in TheAge
Mensaje citado por Ian Lynch [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Wed, 2005-03-23 at 16:50, Daniel Carrera wrote: Chuck wrote: I have OOo installed on my laptop and love it (don't tell my workstation support group though or they'll remove it as unsupported software). When I buy my new XP home PC this week, OOo will be installed and not MS or Corel. But I wouldn't dare save a shared document at work with it. I haven't come across file format problems yet but I don't want to be the one responsible for corrupting a file that 20 other people are using and have to explain why I was using OOo instead of Word or Excel to my boss. Over here, all the Solaris workstations are running StarOffice. The Windows PCs are running MS Office. We are planning to switch the Solaris boxes to Linux over the next year or two. Since Solaris has been open sourced, why switch to Linux? Just curious really. is there a difference in support costs or something? Or are there apps that run on Linux but not Solaris? -- Ian Lynch [EMAIL PROTECTED] ZMS Ltd Yes solaris or slowaris like some users call them is indeed a closed source OS and just recentley 'partially' opened. They are not GPL and not even OSI standard license. I think the latest was a closed-open source license (oxymorons anywhere?). Anyway GCC compiler seems to be not as recent as the linux counterpart so for that reason some applications can't work. Also man is still being ported from various applications to solaris, and finally well the linux community is bigger than solaris nowadays. -- Alexandro Colorado Co-Leader of OpenOffice.org Spanish http://es.openoffice.org/ - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: [discuss] Re: OOo and OpenDocument mentioned in TheAge
one responsible for corrupting a file that 20 other people are using and have to explain why I was using OOo instead of Word or Excel to my boss. From my experience OOo is likely to recover a document that can't be opened in word anymore rather than corrupt it, especially version 2. With different versions of Word around you get these problems anyway eg files that won't print in one version but will in another etc. I've fixed 4 word documents using openoffice in the last two days alone. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
