On Tue, 7 Mar 2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
[snip]
One point that MS is constantly hammering home and the OSS community is
looking away from, whistling as if it didn't exist, is "total cost of
ownership" (TCO.) ... but if it takes 8 hours to retrain each employee
[snip]
What you are referring to is not TCO, but cost of retraining. It's going
to be there no matter what applications you change.
However, if the changes are big enough those retraining costs will be
real and they will be big. In the case of MSO 2007, it would probably
cheaper for M$ users to move to OpenOffice or KOffice than MSO 2007 :
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/02/microsoft_offic.html
Since I've seen extremely non-technical people doing homework for the MS
Office class on OpenOffice.org 2, both kids and adults, and I've seen
other non-technical people confuse Openoffice.org Writer (and for that
matter AppleWorks) with MS Word, I no longer give any credibility to
whines about re-training costs between such similar applications.
I even know one retiree who had been testing OOo along side the familiar
(to him) MS Office. One morning he got an e-mail with a document, opened
it, reviewed the revisions, made his own and sent it off, all before
realising he had used OOo instead of MSO. After that there was not even
any psychological reasons to keep using MSO -- it was out of there for
good.
Interfaces for most F/OSS tools have come a long way since the 1980's,
most users don't notice the difference.
If you want to bring TCO into the picture, then the support staff will
probably find OOo easier ( == cheaper ) to maintain and support.
-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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