On Wednesday 11 June 2003 20:52, Ben Rosenberg wrote:
* James Mohr (suse_mailing_list@jimmo.com) [030611 11:26]: -> ->Granted. But if it is along the lines of "I must provide my proposal in ->MS-Word format because that's what the customer wants and what the competion ->does", then is is economically sound. If I create a presentation that looks ->amaturish because of some "cheap" software when trying to negotiate a $10 ->Million contract, **that** is "extremely economically unsound". At that ->point whether the software licenses cost $20,000 or nothing is really a moot ->point.
Well, my boss wrote all of the proposals to the TSA for a contract to provide all of their VPN, Dialup and other such needs in OpenOffice 1.0.1 saving in .doc format and we got that $45 Million dollar contract. He's also communicating back and forth with Microsoft right now in our renegotiations with them over bCentral which we host and all the documents are being exchanged (no pun intended) without any hassle what so ever. The only machines he has are a Sun Ultra10 running Solaris+KDE using OpenOffice and a Toshiba laptop running SuSE and he uses OpenOffice on this machine as well. I'm not to sure what you mean by cheap software not being up to the task. Remember cheap / free doesn't always equal crap.
I never said it was crap. I said that it some cases it's "cheap". By the way .doc "format" does not have any real meaning. I can save a file in RTF with a .doc extension and it can still be read. Problems arise when I save something in Office 10 (2002) format and try to read it Star Office 4 (or even Office 97 for that matter). So if the customer sends documents to us in a format that we cannot read, we're in trouble. It's like health insurance. You can pray all you want that you will never need it, but if you are wrong, your brankrupt.
Please be well aware that I'm not trying to get you to switch to anything. You are welcome to use whatever you wish. I could actually careless. I stopped talking to brickwalls quite a long time ago. Some companies / people won't change anything unless they come kicking and screaming. I'm not blaming you or tearing into you personally in anyway. I'm just not fond of statements that are untrue. Open Source software can work quite well, but as with anything else the user must know what they are doing. To muddle through something will cost time, effort and energy that just can't be spent in some cases. It's better sometimes to ease into things so that everything is smooth.
What I see happening a lot here (not necessarily) from you, is that people seem to thing that it "always" make sense to migrate. That is both unrealistic and naive. As you say, the time/money "just can't be spent in some case". I had Linux running VMWare for Win2K until my boss said that all of the PCs in the department would be standarized. He admitted that there was no technical reason for doing it, as I do all of my own admin, but the impression that it gave to customers was that we were not organized. Unfortunately, some people think that way. -- --------------------------------------- "Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are." -- John Wooden --------------------------------------- Be sure to visit the Linux Tutorial: http://www.linux-tutorial.info --------------------------------------- NOTE: All messages sent to me in response to my posts to newsgroups, mailing lists or forums are subject to reposting.