Dear Joe:
You must have not seen the latest in Microsoft's requirements for software maintenance agreements. They must be on the latest (and greatest) version at all times. If MS comes out with an upgrade, they must go to it within 3 months. Thus they are attempting to generate recurrent income and that it a whole lot more than a $100 a seat a year not to mention the tangible and intangible costs of upgrading. Thus you are the one out of the loop. This has been part of news items for weeks.
Besides knowing how to use Office does not mean I like it. And it is substantially changed from the first versions I use. And you must not hear the complaints of long time employees when their favorite template or spreadsheet program fails to work in the "new" version. And what do you think happens each time Microsoft comes with a new version. Everyone picks it up instantly with no loss in productivity? What fantasy realm do you work in? Redmond?
And you think that the head honchos of the business learn it real well? Or even want to? How many times have I seen a notebook have to be completely reinstalled from scratch because Outlook mucked up the registry.
I happen to like vi for what it does. It is much better at writing code than the editors in VB, VC, etc are. It is also very good at performing massive changes consistently over many source programs in a large application. Besides, the editor in the orginal VB was based on a much copied program called Word Master. The ancestor of Wordstar and all future versions. Microrim distributed it widely for nominal cost. It shows up in the darnedest places.
Like any good engineer, I use the right tool for a given job. In Linux, you use a different program to spell check (you can run it from within vi (didn't know you could do that, huh?)), another to check style (ever hear of WWB?), another to send to printers (heck you can send it to 10 different printers of different types at the same time even to a linotype machine across town), glossary (WWB), indicies (WWB), versioning (ever hear of RCS?), adding graphics (depends on what you mean by graphics, pie charts, 3D plots, photos or ?), HTML (many tools here) and other things Windows can't do (collaberate on a document from 50 sources all simultaneously).
When required, I can use the wrong tools and get good results, it just takes more time and effort (a lot of hair pulling, etc is also done to relieve fustration). Point and click also is not intuitive in places and is a colossal bore when you need to change 5000 function call's parameters in 200 programs to add some char string parameter needed by a another worker on the team. VB does not work when doing application programming on multiuser multitasking systems. It doesn't work outside of Windows which is not multiuser, period!
That is the big reason why your fixation on Windows is so laughable! It is not multiplatform capable. It doesn't run on big IBM mainframes. Vi does, emacs does and you do not need a 10Mb/sec connection to do its job in a reasonably fast manner. It can work over most WANs (even as low as 9600 baud) with little problems and I can edit files on a machine 30 nodes away where you must use 5 different OSes to get there. Have you ever used utilities like telnet or xterm?
There are many better word processing editors than Word (I have used over 100 different editors in my time and Brief doesn't come close to what I call a good WP editor). MS has yet to come up with a good one. And they still haven't a decent multiplatform one.
But, this detracts from the original argument that the new MS SMA is forcing many companies and governments to consider switching rather than continuing to throw money down a rathole. And they wouldn't consider that, if MS delivered value for the money. From my dealings with them when things go wrong and watching many others who dealt with them, they haven't delivered much value at all. Getting nothing tangible for $100's for each seat in up front costs alone plus significant unknown and not fixed costs in the future (you tell me what MS upgrades will cost and when they will happen including all required bug fixes, patches, service packs, etc. and guarantee them to work with current infrastructure (how many bugs has MS introduced that cause greater problems than the ones they fixed?) since MS allows such little time for interoperability testing) plus those tangible and intangible costs you don't see (but every IT and knowledgable department sees all too well). It is all part of that TCO (even the uncertainty which business people hate) that drives these decisions.
If MS alienates enough of them and once a small number switch and are happy doing so after a short period (this is a fast growing group), there could be a stampede away from MS or any other single vendor. And that will sound the death nell for the "Everyone needs to know Office" claptrap. Its on par with "No one was ever fired for buying IBM" phrase (I know it to be untrue as I saw someone fired for buying IBM).
Pete |
