WOW. . .those screenshots of 3.1Alpha are fantastic

[Mary Stamper]

All true enough....except in my last company, the IT people DID know. We presented a proposal to
management and the response we got , was "Oh no....we have to stay with the mainstream". Upon
further probing, it seemed that 1) fear of the unknown was a great big factor, 2) fear of having
inadequate tech support was a great big factor (they have no confidence in user-based
support.....they want (an are likely willing to pay for) an official support orgranization 3) fear
of the cost of retraining employees on staroffice or openoffice or whatever office was a huge
factor, and lastly 4) fear of not being able to painlessly read MS office documents or flawlessly
export documents that could be read by MS Office was a major factor and along the same lines, a
huge resistence to having to even be cognizant of the the existence of multiple office systems
(export vs. save commands for example) was a huge problem. We ended up giving up because
management didn't even want to see demos or do pilots or anything that would have allowed some
concrete form of education....
--- cr <cr at orcon.net.nz> wrote:
> On Sunday 14 July 2002 18:14, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> > cr wrote:
> > > What will get big companies to consider chucking M$ is M$'s greed, I
> > > think. Nothing else.   If the bean counters start screaming about what
> > > upgrades are costing then the IT guys may have to look for alternatives. 
> > >   Nobody in big companies *ever* considers the poor sods who actually
> > > have to use the stuff.
> >
> > It will help if we have a superior product.
> >
> > Fact: They can also chuck M$ and switch to Solaris but very few have.
> >
> > FYI, there is not license fee for Solaris 8 on single CPU i386 systems.
> 
> I quite agree about the 'superior product'.  
> 
> However, where I work (which is all M$ dominated), the IT people don't even 
> know that Linux can run a windows-like GUI, never mind knowing what Gnome or 
> KDE are.   They don't know that Linux apps can handle MSWord format docs, or 
> PDF files, or JPG's, or HTML, or....      
> 
> They *are* considering trying Linux on a fileserver as an alternative to Win 
> NT, presumably for cost reasons.   
> 
> So if they ever look at Linux + Xfree86, it will help enormously if KDE is a 
> superior product, yes, but right now it doesn't make any difference how good 
> KDE is because they just ain't looking anywhere other than their nearest M$  
> salesman    :(
> 
> I'd say the most important factor, if they do ever look, will be to have a 
> distribution that comes complete with all necessary apps, with a 
> straightforward install procedure.   Fortunately from my own recent 
> experience, RedHat seems to have reached that stage and probably 
> others too.
> 
> cr
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