| I use OO on Mint Linux here at work where everyone else uses Word '07 + Win 7. So here is my experience: > What is a "poorly formatted document"? Had an issue with this today in a word document with tables, OO has serious trouble displaying full page tables properly. There are lots of other subtle things, but I can't reliably produce documents in OO and send them to, say, a client as a word document without checking them directly in Word. > Training costs only go up if you compare it against people already trained with Microsoft Office. This is a non-trivial issue. And the same reason Linux is struggling to reach the corporate desktop. Re-training is, for an organisation, a quite complex business. Because of pay, contracts, organisation, finding the expertise, ticking all the legal/legislative boxes. Another way to consider this is that a lot of people now are doing computer literacy certificates (I think some are even internationally recognised qualifications now). Employers can accept these as saying "this person can use Word fine" which saves them the cost of training and support etc. If they switch to OO this goes away (at least for a while). >> it's a mess.
>How? None of your points really said how, apart from the one below talking about .doc This was some MS brilliance at work; because while the Ribbon bar was initially hated you will generally find that within a corporate environment employees find it quite productive and usable (at least in my experience). The look is so radically difference OO feels awkward (or so I am told by someone who tried it). Generally speaking, looks, GUI and layout are the things that "turn users on" the most. a) they are familiar with the Word way of doing things and b) it has a really fancy looking GUI. This stacks up against OO. >> Staff members will despise it,
>This isn't a point on its own. And yet, it is probably the main reason most organisations won't bother. Even if it takes just a few months for your staff to stop grumbling it probably doesn't feel worth it. And don't forget that the people signing off on such a swap (management) are "staff members" in this context - they will irrationally dislike it too. I like using OO, and find it a competitive piece of software. I even convinced my parents to use, and like, it! But I don't think it will break the corporate barrier for a while yet :) |
Please be kind and file an issue and provide the test-case. thank you.