[plug] MS Office and TCO

[Leon Brooks]

Bradley Woodward wrote:
> On Sat, 09 Sep 2000, Leon Brooks wrote:
>> http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-09-08-004-04-OP-LF-MS

>> MS Office costs businesses about $6 billion each year; with free
>> alternatives like StarOffice that are now available, continuing to pay for
>> MS Office constitutes fiscal irresponsibility -- shareholders and employees
>> should be demanding an end to this colossal waste of corporate funds.

> There is a difference between the cost of purchace and the cost of owning.
> Office costs a lot to buy, but doesn't cost much to own, because everybody
> coming out of receptionist school and business collage knows how to use the
> damn things.

Kind of.

> The training costs are way down, because everybody mimics the
> MS style of applicaton, so everybody basically knows how to navigate the
> menus and toolbars of most new applications.

The trouble begins when they start mimicing the spaghettified macro systems that
typically grow up around Microsoft's "tightly integrated" Office systems, and
the parade really starts when users, because these are the _only_ flexible tools
made available to them, begin building "crystal palaces" of interlocked macros
and documents. One day it all becomes too hard, or some vital system template
gets destroyed by a dying app, or somebody upgrades or reinstalls a server over
a weekend and on Monday morning nothing works any more...

Another TCO revelation arrives with the first macro virus.

Still another with the first non-macro virus.

Then instead of minutes here and there finding a function in unfamiliar places,
the users begin losing the odd day or two here and there when Windows
spontaneously trashes itself. And did they save everything to the server? Not on
your life! Remember what happened during the last NT server upgrade...?

> And from listening to the bean counters at work, $1000 for software is a zero
> consideration.  The main cost for any business is salary, and that's the same
> no matter what operating system is used.

Another one is sanity. It might be worth an extra salary for a young Python geek
to keep a hundred office staff from smacking their heads against the monitor
glass as MS-Office-induced mayhem hits critical mass.

> There is also the cost of making sure all your business partners can read in
> SO formats when you email them spreadsheets or documents.

Eh? SO writes MS-Office formats. Not only that, it writes them better than
MS-Office, in the sense that more non-Office apps can read more of SO's
"MS-Office" files than they can of the genuine article.

> I've had this arguement with the people at work, and even with my parents.
> When I organised their new computer, I installed SO on it.  2 weeks later, my
> father had put Office 2000 over the top of it.  He prefered to spend $300 on
> something he knew well, than spend $0.00 on something he'd never seen before.
> The consertative pragmatist in action.

So how did Daddy Dearest start using MS-Office in the first place? I think his
argument is specious in that it doesn't address the real issue.

-- 
There was a young bard of Japan
Whose limericks never would scan
When they said it was so,
He replied, "Yes, I know,
But I always try to fit as many syllables into the last line as I possibly can."