[plug] MS Office and TCO

[Bradley Woodward]

On Sun, 10 Sep 2000, Shackleton, Kevin wrote:
> I go along with Leon's comments.

So do I, believe it or not.  I'm just don't think that dumping a free copy of 
a word processor on somebody's desk is going to make them change to using it.

> Our IT support probably spends 2/3 of total time fixing those curious
> quirks you get in Office, like page numbering refusing to do what its told,
> pictures automatically re-aligning all over and even off the page and
> especially the fatal exception error.  Maybe we can blame the OS for the
> last, but it happens less often in 3rd-party apps that obey MS's own rules.

As I said, we must have very different organisations.  I've been writing 
design documents and reports for years, and haven't lost a single document 
because of a crash in Word.

> The training argument is similar to our IT manager's reason for not
> allowing any Linux severs on site - we don't know how to drive them.  As if
> we knew how to drive NT.

I'm very close to having permission to put a linux box into the department 
for more than just evaluation purposes.  Last week I was with in a nat's 
whisker of getting them to dump Win2000 server, NT IIS 5.0, MSSQL 7.0 and ASP 
web stuff in favor of Linux, mysql, Apache and PHP4.  I even had pricing to 
show them how I was about to save the company damn nearly $10,000 in software 
licensing fees, not to mention hardware costs.  Instead, it's going on a 
third party Solaris box, but damn it I kept my PHP4.

And I think it's there to say.  No damn way I'm spending a month re-writing 
in ASP, and they know it.  :)