WOW. . .those screenshots of 3.1Alpha are fantastic

[cr]

The old spurious "IBM compatible" syndrome rears its head again. 

Regardless of the fact that employees need retraining every time M$ pushes a 
new version of its software, that the official support is (so I hear) 
absolutely useless, that Windoze2000 outputs docs that can't be read in Win95 
apps unless you do a special 'export' anyway.....    ALL these criticisms 
apply as between different versions of M$.    But the management prefer not 
to notice that.   

I agree, even if our IT people did know all about Linux (which they don't), 
they'd run into an insurmountable obstacle in our management - most of whom 
actually know less about computer use than the lowliest accounts clerk.    
What can be done about this, other than the ever-popular idea of shooting the 
management, I don't know.   ;)

cr

On Monday 15 July 2002 04:30, Mary Stamper wrote:
> 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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