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

On 5 April 2011 15:56, Mike Hall <mike.hall@onepoyle.net> wrote:

> 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.

I rather think that depends on what the nature of the use is. Here, we use
FOSS exclusively. We are a small business but heavily ICT dependent. I can't
recall any circumstances where a bug in OOo has wasted a lot of time. In
fact mostly we use Google's spreadsheet for sharing and put WP type stuff
directly into web pages but I just published a book and previously a
professional manual using OOo and Inkscape without any significant problems.
I can see that some specialist power users will have more problems
particularly if they are locked into VB and other MSO dependencies and I
would have though that was a much more serious consideration than 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
>
>
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