Posted on 07/17/2007 11:30:34 AM PDT by N3WBI3
Give me a clean load of 98SE on a PII 400 mhz with 128mb of ram, and I’ll show you a machine that zips through web browsing, and word processing programs, faster than any open source kludge patched to the hilt to “fit into the system”.
You may want to dip your feet a bit into the open source world. I can think of five modern distros off the top of my head that are far superior to Win98, and would run perfectly on the machine you spec'd.
I can think of about 10 modern distros, that blow the socks off of Win98. Problem is, the minute I load one on a user's computer, I may as well station a technician there, for the next two weeks.
The problem I have with Open Source, as IT, is the knowledge level of the users. Your average novice, is lost, when it comes to OSS... regardless of how "user friendly" the disto might be. It ain't winders.... and I'm not a babysitter.
On top of the fact, that I have anywhere from 100 - 200 new users every year, I've got to consider the help desk side of the equation. The vast majority of 98 problems are known, and documented, and I've got some great "cheat sheets", that allow even a relatively untrained help desk person, to walk someone through something simple, like finding a .pdf file they've downloaded, and lost, or adding a printer, or ....
With something like 20,000 trouble tickets a year, and 5 technicians, I like to have 90% of them resolved in 5 minutes or less, and a single phone call, 10% resolved in a 15 minute visit, and the remaining 10% take up 90% of the available hours. That's impossible to do with open source.
Once again Microsoft's failure to adhere to any kind of published standard is somehow the fault of open source software.
But you are right about one thing, Office 2007 is wildly different, but for those who just want to type a letter, or create a spreadsheet, it only takes them about 45 minutes, not 45 hrs to figure out the major differences.
Then your users aren't doing anything complex (like, say, mail merges or formatting documents to go of to a commercial printer.) As such, they shouldn't require much training to switch to OO.org and your claim that they would require formal training to use it is groundless.
btw... just purchased 500 copies of 2007 for $28 each as an upgrade. $28 is well worth it, to remain compatible with the other 95% of the world.
That 95% is shrinking rapidly. Many state governments are now requiring documents to be saved in ODF rather than Microsoft's wildly proprietary and randomly changing format. The concept of being able to exchange documents with anyone using anything is starting to catch on elsewhere too. This has been common for read-only documents for a long time and the popularity of PDF shows. Now ODF is becoming the format of choice for those that want read-write capability regardless of what the sender used to create it.
The 2% that are too cheap to purchase value for their money, cause about 75% of my trouble tickets.
It isn't about money. It's about standards. Microsoft has gotten away with their "my way or the highway" attitude for a long time but it seems that's starting to change.
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