On 3/7/06, Howard Coles Jr. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Your focus is too narrowed. There's StarOffice, which you can pay 75 > bucks a > seat for and get support, by a business.
I'm sorry - is this the StarOffice users list? I'm not talking about StarOffice, or Luxitive Office, or OpenOffice995, or SolidOffice, or IBM Workspace, or any other for-fee OOo derivitive - I'm talking about OpenOffice.org - the free, open source, cross-platform office suite. Truth is, support is available. > Not only that, but you assume OOo is what you'll always have to use, not > so. That's what we're discussing - that's what this list is about, OpenOffice.org. There's money in the > pocket now (savings per seat from MS noting that training is a wash > because > either way you ARE going to do that), and money for the future. Figure > that! Training is *not* a wash. As I and others have pointed out in this thread already - retraining the location of a few buttons and options from one version of MSO to the next is one thing - retraining a entirely new way of handling Mail Merge, bullets, lists, outlines, macros (which can't be transfered - they have to be rewriten), etc. when you switch from MSO to OOo is a different story. The cost will be more for OOo, because there is far more to learn. Just because Bold, Italics, and Underline work the same way, doesn't mean the whole program is the same. As many on this list were so fond of saying about a year ago - OOo is *not* an MSO clone - the structure is different, the layout is different, and the advanced features are way different. And if you are a part of a company that only looks at today, it must really > stink, and probably will not be around long anyway. Why? Because > businesses > are like people, those who think of today only die tomorrow. There's a difference between looking as far down the road as possible and having sensible plans for the future. When taken to extremes, neither is good. If I *only* look at today, you're right, my rent money, my grocery money, my insurance - all that cash would be spent on an impomptu vaction heck, I would just move. I got plenty of stuff to sell that I'm not using at the moment, I could just sell it all and fly to Hawaii! I just need a one way ticket - I just want to get there. If I *only* look at the future - I won't meet my immediate needs. I know I am hungry now, but if I eat that sandwich, I won't have it for tomorrow. And I will be *really* hungry tomorrow, because I am not going to eat today, to make sure I have enough for later. The point is, you can't do only just one. And obviously there are tens of thousands of businesses that have been in business a long time, that are still in business, that for some reason think MSO is a better investment. These companies are not dropping dead. I don't know for sure - but probably a good deal of the Fortune 500 companies use MSO. (I say that based on the law of averages - when MSO is 95% or more of the market share, there's a good chance most of the companies on the Fortune 500 use it too.) -- - Chad Smith http://www.gimpshop.net/ http://www.whatisopenoffice.org/ Because everyone loves free software!
