Re: [tdf-discuss] European Commitee enter talks with MS licences, Please make your action today against it.

Laszlo,
I worked for perhaps 15 years with various versions of MSO as both a 
power user and as a senior manager with responsibility, inter alia, for 
MSO support. I met all the senior international people at the time, from 
MS and many other suppliers. During that time, whether with short or 
long documents, I personally came across only 2 instances of genuine MSO 
bugs.

Since retirement 16 years or so ago, I have been almost exclusively 
using and promoting OOo/LibO. I know what some of the technical 
advantages are, and I appreciate them. However, each time I start a 
major new activity or project, I run into a major deficiency or bug 
which has typically taken me a day or more's work to understand, write 
bug reports and work out how to get round. Most of those bugs are still 
unfixed. This kind of 'wasted' effort simply does not occur with MSO, or 
at least it didn't to me, nor did I hear complaints of that kind from 
the thousands of end users I was to some degree responsible for 
internationally.

In my professional opinion and with the maximum regret, I do not believe 
that OOo/LibO has a product offering of adequate quality to be 
cost-effective in a high-cost labour economy. The support costs are just 
far too high. Thus, it is my considered though painful conclusion that 
the majority of IT managers in those economies would correctly judge MSO 
to be the better option. As I said, I wish it were different, but it is 
not. We can lobby and protest as much as we like, but in my opinion 
there is absolutely no chance of extensive corporate or governmental 
adoption in Western economies until the product is of comparable quality 
to MSO, by which I primarily mean an absence of bugs.

Mike

On 05/04/2011 12:37, Kürti László wrote:
> Mike,
> Have you ever tried to work with MS office? Have you ever made a doc longer than 10 pages? How many 
> times you had to reedit those MS docs? Just about every time you opened it in a different PC.
>
> Pls don't get me wrong, but MS office works just as OO.o or LibO.
> And this is not the case, but please let yourself off the hook of MS FUDs.
> :)
>
> Laszlo
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mike Hall"<mike.hall@onepoyle.net>
> To: discuss@documentfoundation.org
> Sent: Tuesday, April 5, 2011 1:21:03 PM
> Subject: Re: [tdf-discuss] European Commitee enter talks with MS licences,      Please make your 
> action today against it.
>
> On 05/04/2011 12:11, Kürti László wrote:
> > Even with docx, xlsx format could be read and written by OO.o or LibO (or at least a workaround can 
> > be find).
> Laslo,
> Don't get me wrong, I entirely agree with all your sentiments.
> Unfortunately, in practice the description of the situation I gave will
> dominate. The quote from your email above seems to confirm that even
> your company has experienced significant end user support issues. I just
> wish it were different.


--
Mike Hall
www.onepoyle.net


--
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+help@documentfoundation.org
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted