IBM forcing all employees to stop using MS Office
osnews.com
osnews.com
* No new MS Office Licenses unless approved by the managers.
* Symphony will be the default office suite installed on the Laptops and PCs handed out.
I have seen Lotus Suite (123 etc) installed on recently issued hardware (2008). Typically they also have MS Office installed alongside. This will now be replaced by Symphony suite.
1) Getting manager approval is next to impossible. A friend of mine that's a tech writer was unable to obtain one in the time I was there (approximately a year).
2) The learning curve cost for new users simply exceeds the cost per license. For high-paying employees, a couple hours learning this stuff will cost them a couple hours of productivity. Evidently, large corporations don't function with this in mind.
In Excel, if you're entering data, you press 'tab' to move to the next column, and when you're done with that row, you press Return and it kicks you down and back into the leftmost column. Very handy, since it saves you a mouse movement or many left-arrow presses to get back to the start column. At least the last version of OO Calc I played with didn't mimic this behavior properly---pressing Return just dropped to the next row in the same column, even after entering several columns of data.
Excel may not be the greatest program in the world (let's be honest, it's a bloated monster), but it does a few things right.
I have a recent build of NeoOffice (OO packaged for OS X) on my MBP, and while I'm quite happy using it for casual day-day interaction with small, simpler Word documents (< 100 pages, < 5 Mbytes) - It's nowhere close to prime time for reading in larger, complex Word Documents; for any serious integration with Microsoft, you absolutely, positively, _have_ to have the native applications on your desktop. And even then it's not a slam dunk if someone created with a different version of MS Office on a different platform.
And, given that we all have to deal with those documents occasionally (Unlike me, who has to deal with them every day) - That means Microsoft continues to sell licenses to people who only use their software to deal with the rare Microsoft Document that blows up their copy of OO.
Seriously - Pages on the Macintosh (Awesome), or OO is more than enough for 99% of the worlds document creators - the only reason those 99% _need_ to purchase Microsoft Office anymore is for compatibility.
That's why Microsoft fights standards like ODF tooth and nail - once people have a choice, they'll make it.
Which is why beating them in the standards war is important. The business world can't afford to support monopoly rents at this time. Requiring your vendors to support ODF and open formats is a first step.
What is more likely is that one division is being required at this time, and more are to follow. It makes some sense for IBM to have its own office suite from a business perspective. 330,000 licenses to Office surely adds up and its just another cost cutting move for IBM
Edit: They also will most likely not force all client facing employees to switch, as I can foresee compatibility problems.
Edit2: Just checked my machine and I have the full Lotus Symphony suite installed. Don't know when it got there or how, but its there now along with most recent Lotus Notes 8
I work for a small engineering and instrument making company. I suggested trying OpenOffice in a company, it was carefully considered and rejected, and there are reasons for it:
1. Some of the documents we get from partners who write them in MS Word just don't open right. The company can't afford this, period.
2. OpenOffice Calc doesn't have compound filtering, like MS Excel. I.e. you filter column by one parameter, then by another. In Excel it is compound filtering: you select list of parts that satisfies the condition1 AND condition2, in OpenOffice Calc the condition2 just replaces the condition1. Maybe it's even more _right_, maybe the behaviour of MS Office is just a gimmick - I don't know, but the fact is that a guy who manages inventory of parts in our company came to depend on the functionality of MS Office and making switch is just impractical.
The version of OpenOffice was 2.4 back then, but I have no reason to expect that those issues have been fixed since. OpenOffice is a nice project and helluva work, and open source is cool, but there are reasons why not everyone can use it.
That being said, if there's a customer with an issue, or a new grad looking for a job, and they use Word as their default word processor, then there's always Microsoft's Word Viewer which lets employees view Word files.
In my opinion, people need to stop making such a big deal out of this. From what I've seen, no one is really upset about the change, and it's definitely saving the company a lot of money. So if employees don't care, and shareholders are happy, why does it matter?
Nope.